Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Emerton Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Emerton (CB)]

My Lords, the Bill proposes a major change in the criminal law. The title used for the previous Bill was assisted suicide, while this one is assisted dying. “Assisted dying” is a much more attractive term to the public, and I think it has attracted the large number of letters that we have all had. We have to address this, as many noble Lords have said, by seeing that there are enough safeguards to protect people from thinking that they are going to commit suicide. There is a difference between assisted dying and suicide.

I declare an interest, having been 60 years in the caring profession of nursing and as a carer for an elderly, mentally ill friend. My experience in learning disabilities taught me much about the vulnerability and needs not only of patients but of their families. Many of the elderly population today have seen life through two world wars, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, and understand only too well the preciousness of the word “life”. I live in a retirement development and see 250 people who are over the age of 60. They are concerned for the future.

Recently, Dr John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, announced his support for the Bill and suggested that, to meet the plight of the elderly, a midwife-type person was required. Midwives are trained to preserve life and work to ensure the safety of mother and baby. What is being proposed in the Bill as it stands at the moment is the exact opposite: it is about providing the means to commit suicide. What we need is not legalised help with suicide but much better and larger palliative care provision. We have had comments on palliative care, and I agree entirely that this country has a high reputation for palliative care provision. Its quality is outstanding but there is just not enough and it is not wide enough to meet the need. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, made an impassioned request that this be looked at, which I would support.

In the last eight months, I have been an in-patient in the care of the NHS and the private sector, and a visitor in an NHS hospital where the red flag had gone up and the emergency beds opened. In each case, I witnessed the best possible care being delivered to a very vulnerable group of elderly patients, both in the NHS and in the private sector, including to patients at the end of life, who were receiving the highest level of care. In one establishment, I had to commend very much the multi-professional team that visited each end-of-life patient every morning and had a conference, and the families were involved as well. There is good end-of-life care, but we need to do more.

The Bill before us, as other noble Lords have said, affects medical and healthcare professionals. The Royal College of Nursing, with 415,000 members, adopted a stance of neutrality in 2009, when the previous Bill on assisted suicide was debated. Since then, much research into good practice for end-of-life care has taken place. The RCN has published guidelines and has been careful to see that they are established across the nursing profession.

I pose the question: is this a responsibility that doctors and nurses want to take on or should take on? I believe that very few of them want to do so. It is on the real assisted dying—on supporting and caring for patients as they die—that we in this House should focus our attention, and not on the assisted suicide that this Bill is offering under the name.