Pro-life groups have reacted with concern to the publication of a report by the Nuffield Trust taking a look at the delivery of assisted suicide where it’s already legal.
Earlier this 12 months the House of Commons voted to legalise medically assisted suicide. The proposed law can be debated by the House of Lords in September.
The Nuffield report checked out 15 jurisdictions wherein the practice is already legal to attract conclusions in regards to the implications of it being legalised within the UK.
It says that implementing assisting suicide across the NHS could be a “substantial task” and “would place added pressure on NHS, hospice and social care capability”.
“In countries where assisted dying is legal, policymakers often underestimate the additional capability needed within the health and care system to get the service up and running and the continued funding needed to deliver it,” the report says.
The report found that assisted suicide can place emotional burdens on carers like “guilt” and “stigma”, and that in some jurisdictions “eligibility criteria expand over time”.
Across the 15 jurisdictions, the report found that “a comparatively small variety of clinicians are involved in a high proportion of assisted deaths”.
Weighing up the implementation of assisted suicide within the UK, Nuffield said that the ethnic diversity of NHS staff “could increase the variety of staff with a conscientious objection to assisted dying (opting out of a practice they regard as morally mistaken)”.
It also concluded that “each individual and institutional attitudes towards assisted dying can change over time through education, experience and relationship constructing, with some opposition softening as the method becomes more familiar and accepted”.
Care Not Killing, a campaign group against assisted suicide, found shortcomings with the report in failing to perform a bias risk assessment or take non-academic material into consideration.
The organisation noted that the research highlights the heavy emotional cost that health professionals involved in assisted dying routinely experience.
Outlining among the negative experiences of health professionals, Nuffield reported that in Canada 85.5% of social staff experienced “medium to high emotional charge” after participating in an assisted suicide, while 62.4% required “processing breaks”.
Both the Care Not Killing alliance and Christian advocacy group CARE noted that the Nuffield report showed that legalising assisted suicide would increase pressures on the NHS.
Caroline Ansell, Director of Advocacy at CARE, said, “This report highlights the trends which have been obvious for years, namely that if you happen to legalise assisted suicide, the numbers increase over time and the factors is at all times expanded to incorporate increasingly people.
“So not only is assisted suicide highly expensive from the beginning, but the prices will only increase as the entire idea becomes normalised. Meanwhile, where will this leave palliative care which is already cripplingly underfunded?”
Dr Gordon Macdonald, CEO of Care Not Killing, commented, “We agree with the report that in all of the jurisdictions which have legalised assisted suicide or euthanasia, over time there’s pressure to erode safeguards and widen eligibility criteria.
“It is time that Parliament ditched the harmful and controversial bill and as an alternative turn their attention to fixing the UK’s broken palliative and social care systems which can be failing many vulnerable, elderly and disabled people.”
Andrea Williams, Chief Executive of Christian Concern, added her voice to the concerns being raised, saying that the legalisation of assisted suicide “involves changing the very foundation of the NHS in order that the NHS shouldn’t be just focused on treating illnesses, but additionally on helping patients to finish their lives”.
“This change undermines the very basis of medication and the explanation that folks decide to work in clinical fields of medication and medical care. It constitutes an enormous cultural and moral change to our society which could have a big impact on the NHS usually,” she said.
“We have argued that this bill can be very difficult to implement for all kinds of reasons. The Nuffield Report now provides solid evidence from other jurisdictions of the multiple problems faced by countries that determine to facilitate assisted suicide.
“The NHS is already stretched to the limit and struggling to supply the heavy demand on its services. Legalising assisted suicide will only add to those pressures by requiring the NHS to find out the eligibility of patients who request it and by forcing the NHS to help within the suicide of those that qualify.”
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