Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Tebbit

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, it might be helpful to the House if I intervene very briefly. The whole policy of cardiopulmonary resuscitation is being revised. The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, has raised a very important point. Resuscitation can be a whole batch of treatments. Giving insulin to a diabetic whose blood sugar has gone dangerously high is resuscitative. Similarly, giving sugar if they are hypo is resuscitative. I would like to park resuscitation per se and focus on cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which is a specific intervention to try to restart the heart when it has stopped.

We know that the chance of that having any effect is exceedingly low when people are already dying of a disease. It is in those patients, where death is anticipated and accepted by everybody and is a natural process at the end of life, that the forms are there so that a nurse who does not know the patient, who has just come on duty and finds that they have collapsed, does not have to run down the corridor and get the trolley and so on. That is completely different from the person who collapses on the station and people, rightly, grab the defibrillator and attempt to resuscitate them, as has happened in your Lordships’ Chamber—gladly, successfully. We have a very good track record of resuscitation in this Chamber.

DNR forms are completely different because you are talking about a life that is coming naturally to a close. This Bill is about taking the decision to deliberately give lethal drugs, irrespective of how long that life may go on for, because, as we will come to in later amendments, we just do not know. I wonder if that helps the noble Lord.

[Lord Tebbit]

I think, my Lords, it does. It is a matter of whether it is a positive or a passive intervention. That is the distinction.