National Council for Palliative Care responds to the Assisted dying for the terminally ill Bill

The National Council for Palliative Care has published its response to the House of Lords Select Committee report on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill.

The National Council for Palliative Care (formerly The National Council for Hospice and Specialist Palliative Care Services) is the umbrella organisation for all those who are involved in providing, commissioning and using hospice and palliative care services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It promotes the extension and improvement of palliative care services regardless of diagnosis in all health and social care settings and across all sectors to government, national and local policy makers.

The National Council has produced this response in advance of the forthcoming House of Lords debate on the Select Committee’s report, due to be held on 10 October. It is hoped that the response will assist and inform this debate. At the same time, the response is intended to contribute to the broader and continuing debate within society on the issues of voluntary euthanasia and assisted dying.

The National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC) welcomes the balanced nature of the Select Committee’s report, and particularly the way in which it identified the significant issues and gaps in the evidence that need to be addressed before a decision whether or not to legalise assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia can safely be made by Parliament.

According to the NCPC these issues include:

• The ethical and practical implementation questions created by the proposed legislation.
• The difficulty in drafting satisfactory legal definitions of when a patient is “terminally ill” or experiencing suffering, that also match clinical realities.
• The extent to which palliative care can address the wider aspects of suffering, through psychological, spiritual and social care, as well as providing physical and symptom relief.
• The impact on the relationships between patients and their professional carers in the context of current British medical practice and within our current healthcare systems.

The National Council believes that unless and until these issues can be resolved, it would not be right to change the law. The NCPC welcomes the emphasis placed by the Select Committee on the need to develop palliative care for all those who need it. This follows similar recommendations made by the House of Commons Health Committee in its report on palliative care in 2004.

The National Council’s Chairman, Francis Plowden, said:

“It should be emphasised that palliative care is vitally important in its own right, and should not be portrayed simply as an alternative to assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia.”

A copy of the Executive Summary may be found in PDF format, on the BGS newsletter site: www.bgsnet.org.uk. The full publication is available at £20 per copy and may be ordered from the NCPC website: www.ncpc.org.uk

Vicky Kington
Communications Co-ordinator
NCPC