About 100 representatives from Mennonite health care institutions across Canada will be in Steinbach Wednesday night through Friday for the annual conference of the Canadian Mennonite Health Assembly. It will take place at Mennonite Heritage Village. Jim Williams of Cambridge, Ontario is the secretary-treasurer of the organization. He says a number of their guest speakers will address the conference on matters related to the federal government's Medical Assistance in Dying legislation that was approved in June.

"This conference will be one of coming together and looking at some of the related issues as far as palliative care, good pain management, how we meet the spiritual needs of our residents and particularly those needs at close to the end of life."
    
Williams says they have a variety of guest speakers who will discuss the new federal legislation from the medical side of the issue as well as the legal and ethical sides. Manitoba Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen is scheduled to make some remarks on Thursday. Williams says the discussion about the legislation started at last year's annual meeting.

"This year's conference is actually, I would say, a continuation of a conversation that we began a year ago at our conference in Waterloo, Ontario. The theme of that conference was "Loving Life, Embracing Death." We were well aware of the fact that medical assistance in dying was approaching and we wanted to have a conversation about how we approach that issue as faith-based Christian organizations. And so, at the end of last year's conference, the Manitoba group said that they would like to continue that this fall and we're looking forward to that starting Wednesday evening."

The theme for this year's conference is, "Places of Refuge." Williams says most of the Mennonite health care facilities in Canada involve long term care or nursing home care although there are other branches as well.