Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord MacKenzie of Culkein and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord MacKenzie of Culkein (Lab)]

My Lords, I endorse the points that have just been made. There may be some flaws in the drafting but we need something like this in the Bill.

I will have something to say about nursing ethics later on as we consider the Bill. But for any registered nurse, whether she is the daughter of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, or anybody else, to suggest to anyone in any circumstance that they should consider ending their own life should see them being marched fairly swiftly before the regulatory body and struck off. That would be my view as a nurse. I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, will help us and say that something like this should be in the Bill.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, raised a question that has exposed drafting flaws in the amendment, but it actually makes a very important point. I say that based on my own experience of teaching junior doctors, particularly in the Netherlands, where they would frequently say to me that they were under pressure from families for a person to have euthanasia or assisted suicide. The requests were not coming from the patients themselves.

The other situation that we really need to be aware of, as has already been alluded to, is the vulnerability of patients to suggestions from their clinicians. I recall going on a house call with a general practitioner. The patient, who had lung cancer, was breathless and finding life difficult, and wanted to start the process of talking about euthanasia. I listened for a time but noticed that the patient was very wheezy. As the consultation went on—and I could understand a fair amount of it—I said, “Has she had an inhaler for her wheeziness?”. The conversation had gone so strongly down the route of processing her euthanasia request that the GP turned to me and said, “I had not thought of it”. We then had a discussion about how if she was wheezy it was worth trying, and the lady then said, “My grandson has an inhaler and he hates it”. I said, “Perhaps if you have one and he can teach you how to use it, it may help him adapt”. Her reply was, “Oh, at least I can be of some use again”. The request finished; we did not continue with it, but she got an inhaler to try, exactly the same as her grandson had, with the explicit request that she got him to teach her.

I put that in as an example of just how vulnerable people are to suggestion and how easy it is for a consultation to steer down one road and in that process inadvertently forget the other therapeutic options that might be open, might need to be explored and might need a little bit of thinking outside the box.