‘Assisted dying’ law would not have stopped Gosport scandal
I WAS unaware of the existence of the earlier letter to which Dr Lee refers in his most recent letter to the Guernsey Press (‘Gosport highlights need to regulate assisted dying’, 2 July) and so I was in no position to reply to it.
His theme seems to be that an ‘assisted dying’ law is needed because palliative care cannot always relieve all the symptoms of dying and that doctors are surreptitiously hastening dying patients’ deaths illegally.
This notion of ‘covert euthanasia’ is a familiar, but unjustified, argument promoted by the ‘assisted dying’ lobby.
Dr Lee’s description of putting patients into a drug-induced coma to hasten their end is difficult to reconcile with modern palliative care, which is very different from what it was 20, let alone 50, years ago.
Palliative care today works through open and honest conversations with patients about the causes of their distress, which are often psychological, not the hushed tones of yesteryear.
We neither hasten nor postpone our patients’ deaths. Our aim is to enable dying people to live well until they die and support their families throughout. When distress continues for whatever reason, we redouble our efforts to understand the underlying causes and to work with the patient and their family to find a solution.
I cannot claim there is a 100% success rate (no form of medical treatment can achieve that) but I can say that instances where modern specialist palliative care cannot alleviate the distress of dying are the exception.
Dr Lee seeks to enlist the recently published report into deaths at Gosport Memorial Hospital in the 1980s and 1990s (Gosport War Memorial Hospital: The Report of the Gosport Independent Panel, June 2018) in support of his case.
That report clearly states that: ‘It may be tempting to view what happened at the hospital in the context of public debate over end of life care, what a “good death” is, and assisted dying. That would be a mistake.’
An ‘assisted dying’ law would not have prevented what happened at Gosport.
DR CAROL DAVIS,
Consultant in palliative medicine,
University Hospital Southampton.