Assisted dying: 102 Yorkshire doctors urge MPs to vote down bill over palliative care
More than 100 doctors from across Yorkshire have urged MPs to vote against the proposed assisted dying law due to the lack of high quality palliative care.
Writing in The Yorkshire Post, healthcare professionals, from GPs in Sheffield to consultants in Harrogate, said: “Voting no gives the Government a crucial opportunity to fix the current underfunding of palliative care and to offer genuine choice at the end of life.”
The doctors, many of whom are palliative care consultants across the county, wrote: “Our opinions vary on the principle of assisted dying, but we unanimously agree that this Bill would result in some people choosing an assisted death without guaranteed access to high quality palliative care.”
Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater, who has put forward the assisted dying bill, has claimed it is the strictest of its kind in the world.
It would allow terminally-ill people, with six months to live, to be able to seek an assisted death with the approval of two doctors and an expert panel.
However, issues with palliative care have been one of the main concerns raised by opponents of the bill, fearing that people may feel they are forced to choose an assisted death due to a lack of quality care.
While the Government is remaining neutral on the bill, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has revealed he will vote against it over worries about palliative care.
In their letter to The Yorkshire Post, the doctors raised concerns over the provision of palliative care across the region.
“Dignity at the end of life is currently limited by wider pressures hospices and palliative care services face,” the said.
“The Kirkwood Hospice in Huddersfield recently made 19 employees redundant, reducing the number of patients they can afford to care for from 2,100 to 1,300 annually.
“The percentage funding from the government for St Michael’s Hospice in North Yorkshire has dropped over the past five years from 35 to 40 per cent to 28 per cent , with service reductions being ‘highly likely’.
“The financial situation at St Luke’s Hospice, Sheffield is ‘significantly challenging’.”
The doctors said they fear that if the bill passes “healthcare professionals will be legally obliged to deliver fully funded assisted death, without any reciprocal guarantee of adequate palliative care provision”.
“A change in the law would mean investment in assisted death, while palliative care services struggle for breath,” they added.
“We call on all Yorkshire MPs to look around them at the current inequalities in their constituencies and think about how these can be repaired.”
This comes as MPs once again debated Ms Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill again yesterday, with a final third reading vote expected to be taken on 20 June.
The Spen Valley MP lent her support to an amendment requiring the Health Secretary to publish an assessment of the availability, quality and distribution of palliative and end-of-life care one year after the bill passing into law.
She said MPs should not have to choose between supporting assisted dying or palliative care as it is not an “either/or” conversation for dying people.
Ms Leadbeater said palliative care and assisted dying “can and do work side by side to give terminally-ill patients the care and choice they deserve in their final days”, and urged MPs to support “all options available to terminally ill people”.
Ms Wilson’s amendment is supported by Marie Curie, which said it is “desperately needed as the end-of-life care system is in crisis, with huge gaps in services and a lack of NHS leadership on this vital part of our health and care system”.