The government would be ‘foolish’ if it ignored warnings in palliative care about assisted dying
It would be “foolish” for the Government to ignore doctors’ warnings about palliative care while MPs press ahead with assisted dying legislation for England and Wales, the health and social care committee chairman has said.
The bill, which passed its first parliamentary hurdle in November, would give terminally ill adults with six months to live the right to end their lives. It will now be investigated by a committee of MPs, who will hear public evidence from this month. It is likely to pass a number of amendments before returning to the House of Commons at the end of April.
Health committee chair Layla Moran, who voted in favor of the bill, said the government’s aim should be to ensure that as few people as possible use the assisted dying mechanism if it is passed into law. It is clear that the committee will turn its attention to the state of play in palliative care later this year.
Moran, a Liberal Democrat, said she disagreed with some MPs who pushed for changes to Kim Leadbeater’s bill to prevent doctors from proactively offering patients assisted death.
“When I speak to doctors, they feel very strongly that if this is a course of treatment, which is a medicalised matter, it would be wrong not to tell patients and families that this is an option. The question is: how do you do that?”
Moran said the government must not waste this moment by focusing on the state of palliative care or risk losing public trust.
“I have always agreed with the principle (of assisted dying), but when we look at the different pressures that exist within the service as a whole, when we speak to doctors, and in particular palliative care doctors, we would we are foolish not to do so. listen to their warnings about the impact this may have on very vulnerable patients,” she said.
“I want an assisted dying bill to be passed, and then I want Parliament to make it a goal to minimize the number of people who ever have to use it. I am not convinced that without this bill we would have had the focus on palliative care.”
Moran said she hoped the bill’s passage through Parliament would be motivation to keep palliative care in the spotlight. Last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced a further £126m funding increase for hospices, many of which had said they were facing crippling costs, mainly due to the rise in national insurance contributions for employers.
Moran said she was not convinced by arguments from opponents of the bill that the state of palliative care was a reason not to move forward with assisted dying. “Palliative care in Britain is in a terrible state,” she said. “The Health and Social Care Selection Committee would like to consider this in detail in due course.
“But if we try to solve palliative care through this bill, everything will go wrong. So I think we need to be very clear: the bill has accelerated the conversation, but it is not for this bill to solve palliative care; it is up to the department and (social care minister) Stephen Kinnock and everyone else in parliament to do this. make sure that happens.”
Moran said if the bill was passed, she expected the committee to examine the practical aspects and gather evidence on the implementation of the legislation, including guidance for patients and medical professionals, subject to the agreement of all committee members.
“Nowhere in a bill do you ever get the details of how to implement policy – that’s up to the National Health Service and everyone else involved. But that is where the select committee could then look at the details of implementation,” she said.
Moran said this process would come naturally once the principle of assisted dying was passed into law. “I just can’t accept that not enough attention is being paid to it. “I think Parliament is perfectly capable of providing the level of scrutiny to get this right,” she said.
“I think we often forget that we are legislators ourselves and that we should be able to do this. And I don’t like the infantilization of parliament, that we cannot possibly do anything unless the government takes the initiative. I find that quite dangerous.”
She said the bill remained “fragile” due to the possibility of private members’ bills falling outside parliamentary time.
“All it will take is a war or some other political crisis to distract everyone, and parliament will run out of time. We reached this milestone with a pretty decent majority. It’s just too important not to get it right. If you don’t agree with it, agree with it,” she said.