Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Twenty-fourth sitting)

Sojan Joseph Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

Record keeping is a huge issue in our healthcare system. A huge number of coroners’ reviews have identified that record keeping has been an issue. By specifying only that clinicians need record a “recordable event”, we are leaving it as the responsibility of individual clinicians to decide what a recordable event is.

It is important that a good record be available to prevent future incidents and learn good practice. Leaving it open to a clinician to decide whether something is a recordable event could lead to most issues not getting recorded. For example, if a clinician has identified that there was coercion, it will be for the clinician to decide how much documentation to do. In my view, if they have identified a coercion, that should be recorded as an incident and further investigation should be done, but the Bill leaves it up to the clinician to decide. There is no standard for record keeping across the healthcare system, so a care home’s may be different from an NHS ward’s. I think it is for the Committee to look into what “recordable event” actually means.

[Stephen Kinnock]

The purpose of amendments 474 to 478 is to improve the drafting of the Bill by creating a new definition of “recordable event”. Recordable events are the events set out in clause 16(1) related to the recording of declarations and statements.

The amendments would also make consequential changes to clause 16, which refer to the occurrence of the recordable event, as per the new definition, and include reference to a report in addition to a statement or declaration. The reference to a report is consequential on the amendments already agreed by the Committee to clauses 7 and 8.

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That is all very helpful. That is what we thought the Bill said anyway. It is not clear to me what the purpose of subsections (7) and (8) is, except that there is inherent danger in subsection (6). I am afraid that subsections (7) and (8) do not cancel that danger, because of the inherent lack of clarity—the blurring—that exists in the concept of assisting the person to ingest or otherwise self-administer.

[Sojan Joseph]

Will the hon. Gentleman clarify something? He is making a valid point, and I have been thinking about it. As a nurse who has worked in many areas, I know that a disabled person may not be able to take medication by themselves, and sometimes a nurse has to administer it with a spoon. There may be occasions on which a person’s medication comes back out and they have to do it a few times. Is that something the hon. Gentleman is concerned about—actually pushing the medication into the person?