Terminally ill patients could choose assisted dying due to the lack of palliative care, a senior nursing chief has admitted. The head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Professor Nicola Ranger, told Kim Leadbeater’s Bill committee that it “could be possible” that patients might choose assisted dying because of inadequate palliative care.
Prof Ranger said palliative care was not “as good as it needs to be” across the country. During Tuesday’s evidence session, she was asked by Conservative MP Danny Kruger: “So it could be possible that somebody is requesting assisted dying because of the absence of adequate palliative care?” She responded: “I think when you put it in a question like that, it could be possible, but what we would want to strive to do is have a system that doesn’t leave anyone in distress.”
The admission was one of several moments on the first day of evidence highlighting the complexities of implementing assisted dying. Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, warned MPs that implementing this legislation was “best not done at speed if you can avoid it.”
Whitty said it would be necessary to have “training for people to be able to do this in an appropriate and dignified way, if that’s what Parliament choose.” He added: “I think that what we would want to do is to have the time to do that, but you can do things at speed, if you need to. My view is this is something which is best not done at speed if you can avoid it.”
The committee also heard from a palliative care doctor with a decade of experience, who said she was opposed not on principle, but because she believed palliative care provision hindered free choice. Dr Rachel Clarke said: “The real-world conditions of the NHS today are such that people’s suffering means occasionally they will beg me to end their life, and I know that that begging is coming not from, for example, the cancer per se, but because they’ve actually not been getting any adequate pain relief.”
Experts were almost unanimous in agreeing that the current provision in Ms Leadbeater’s Bill for a High Court judge to sign off on every assisted death was impractical. Sir Nicholas Mostyn, a former High Court judge, told MPs that under current estimates, there could be around 6,000 assisted deaths a year in the UK. He pointed out that if judges took two hours to process each case, that would create 12,000 hours of work, which he said was “impossible” for the courts to handle.