British Medical Association (BMA) consultants have voted in favour of a motion stating that assisted suicide is not healthcare and presents “serious moral hazards to consultants”.
Motion 46, proposed by the BMA’s South Regional Consultants Committee, affirms that MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill “raises serious potential moral hazards for consultants, and serious potential adverse impacts on health services”.
It advised that “the BMA must be clear that, if the bill were to become law”, an “opt-in model” must be “adopted for providers, and no consultant shall be expected to be involved in any part of the assisted dying process, including having no obligation to either suggest assisted dying to patients, nor refer patients for it”.
Secondly, the motion states, the BMA shall make it clear that “assisted dying is not a health activity and it must not take place in NHS or other health facilities, and assisted dying providers must be employed under separate contractual arrangements”.
Both parts of the motion were passed by at a BMA consultants conference last week.
Andrew Green, the chairman of the BMA’s ethics committee, said that assisted suicide “should not be part of the standard role of doctors…
“We believe that a separate service outside of existing pathways… would provide reassurance both to doctors and patients, as only those healthcare staff who have opted in to provide the service, and have completed specialised training, would be able to take part.”
The Leadbeater Bill, which passed a first vote at Second Reading last year, proposes to legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill adults with six months to live. MPs are currently scrutinising Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill at Committee stage.
Yesterday, at one such Public Bill Committee sitting, Danny Kruger MP warned that the Leadbeater Bill is “a direct contradiction of the Hippocratic oath, which requires doctors to save people’s lives and do nothing to bring about their death – including giving them lethal drugs. It is right there in the Hippocratic oath…
“Normally, the obligation on a doctor would be to relieve their symptoms and try to bring them back to life… There is a difference between allowing somebody to die and giving them lethal drugs that make them die.”
It was also reported this week that assisted suicide provision could be outsourced to private companies to ease pressure on the NHS. While assisted suicide would be offered for free on the NHS, it is understood that government ministers have “no in-principle objection” to it also being offered by the private sector.
Last year, Health Secretary Wes Streeting warned that assisted suicide, if legalised, would have “resource implications” for other national health services.
“To govern is to choose”, he said. “If Parliament chooses to go ahead with assisted dying, it is making a choice that this is an area to prioritise for investment. And we’d have to work through those implications.”
Mr Streeting added: “I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.”
Palliative care doctors are overwhelmingly opposed to assisted suicide. In a 2020 position statement, the Association for Palliative Medicine (APM), representing over 1,300 palliative medicine doctors in the UK, said it “opposes any change in the law to license doctors to supply or administer lethal drugs to a patient to enable them to take their own life.
“The majority (85%) of our membership do not support a change in the law, and a similar percentage would refuse to participate in assisted suicide or administer euthanasia.”
Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary of the APM, said in 2023 that “it is bonkers” that the UK is “talking about having an assisted dying/assisted suicide Bill that would be 100% commissioned and funded by the NHS when we leave the palliative care sector to be funded by the charitable sector.
“That is the state essentially endorsing death while not funding and paying for palliative care.”
