Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Jopling and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I stated earlier that I saw merit in the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, because they took doctors out of the gatekeeping role. I would like to expand on that briefly now.

The advantage of an independent medical expert is that you will know that you have somebody who has been properly trained, whose assessments are audited and, where there is monitoring in the process, that they have to be updated in that area and discipline—and that they carry credentials, as well as being able to negotiate the court process. As part of that assessment, it seems essential that others affected by the death are also considered in the process—in particular, children. I have spoken before in this House about the problems for children who are bereaved. I do not think that the House should underestimate the emotional problems for a child whose parent has committed suicide or had an assisted suicide, or the difficulties that they may go on to feel: that their love was inadequate to support the person whom they loved—their parent—through the last days, weeks or months of their life, and how damaging that can be for the rest of their lives.

I also strongly support the concept of having a court-appointed person who could take the drugs out to the person who has gone through the process and for whom assisted suicide is being agreed. The way that the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is written at the moment is completely impractical because in reality not all patients die rapidly on ingesting their drugs. Some die within minutes but the median time is actually 25 minutes, if we base it on the Oregon experience. However, some take 41 hours to die. That is going to tie people up for a very long time.

We are talking not about therapeutic drugs but about a massive overdose of a drug at a fixed point. Later we will come on to debate lethal drugs and the difference between those and medication. There can also be monitoring of whom the drugs go to when they go out, and the return of drugs to a central point if they have not been used—as well as having someone who is trained to deal with the complications that occur, which has not been addressed and which, I respectfully point out to the House, almost no doctors are equipped to cope with at the moment. Yes, they may learn, but that would be at the expense of patients.

The other reason why I see the merit of having a completely independent process of assessment is, as I said before, that it does not contaminate the care that is being given to the person by the clinicians. It allows conversations to go on without the patient feeling that they have locked themselves in—that in a way they can pursue a parallel track. They can be assessed by the court but they can still have their own practitioner working to improve their quality of life, not believing that, now they are applying to fix a date for their death, some of the interventions feel pointless and futile.

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has just said something that has totally appalled me: that in these circumstances—in Oregon, particularly, I believe—it can take 41 hours for the injections to take effect. I am horrified to hear that. Would she be kind enough to try to give us rather more of an explanation from her background and experience about how this happens? It has come as a shock to me.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

I will certainly try to explain. The data come from the Oregon Health Authority’s own reports, which are written annually, based on the returns by the doctors. We know only the information that is given by the doctors; we do not know what goes on otherwise. If a doctor does not report it, it is not known. We also know from the Oregon health reports that three patients actually woke up again and did not go on to die.

The point is that you are giving a massive dose of barbiturates that is at least 20 times what you might use therapeutically to render someone unconscious but leave them alive; it is a huge dose. When someone is frail and very near death, they may well die rapidly from ingesting a small amount of an additional drug, but I would also point out that in its data the Oregon Health Authority says that the shortest time was one minute, and that is before any drug would be absorbed. I found that interesting because, in my own clinical experience, there are patients who, when the family says to them: “It’s okay, you can let go”, die within minutes of that statement being made. In other words, when they are given permission to die, they let go of the drive to stay alive. I wonder whether the figures in Oregon showing a very short time demonstrate that the person has signalled that now they are letting go, and that is it. I am worried by the prolonged figures, however, and I would point out that the median means that half the cases take longer than 25 minutes. That still seems to me to be quite a long time, but we will discuss complications later in the debate, not in relation to these amendments.

There is merit in not using the clinical team that is looking after the patient, whoever they are, but using an independent assessment by people who are properly trained in assessing capacity and who have the ability to ask questions about the family that the doctor who was looking after the patient may, for whatever reason, feel uncomfortable or inadequate about asking. They may not be adequately trained, because very few doctors are properly trained in assessing capacity. I also emphasise to the House the merit of having an independent person give the drugs.

My final point is that it is important to look at those jurisdictions that have changed the law regarding what happens if you do not have the kind of control that the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, have been trying to put in. We know from Belgium that 32% of its physician-assisted euthanasia—that is how its law is framed—now happens without the explicit request of the patient, and we know from Belgium’s own data that it estimates that 47% is not reported. So without having these kinds of controls, you develop a very leaky system. The thought of people’s lives being ended without their explicit request is something that I find horrifying.