Assisted dying
SIR – The article by Mick Brown, “Right to Die” (The Telegraph Magazine, July 28) rightly highlights an issue that should be brought more into public consideration.
I support the right of terminally ill adults to control the manner and timing of their deaths. I have respect for my colleagues who are of a different view, but I believe the profession as a whole must seek to play a more constructive role in this debate than it has done to date.
I recently attended a meeting of the Canadian Medical Association and saw how its mature and measured input into the implementation of assisted dying has been to the benefit of both patients and doctors.
In the UK, the BMA, the academy of medical royal colleges, the General Medical Council and other healthcare bodies should likewise now openly take the opportunity to play their part in influencing Parliament and determining what such a change in the law looks like, rather than persist with the view that such an evolution should not happen – an approach that increasingly looks out of touch with the rest of society.
Britain provides an unrivalled, and often under-appreciated, level of care to dying people. However, medical practice has its limits. To fulfil our duty to do what is best for our patients, doctors must help find a way to provide more meaningful end-of-life choice to those who need and want it. Professor Sir John Temple FRCS Birmingham
SIR – The Supreme Court has ruled that, when families and doctors are in agreement, medical staff will be able to remove feeding tubes from patients in a permanent vegetative state without applying to the Court of Protection (report, July 30).
Our long-standing nursing concerns about the dangers of the Mental Capacity Act (2005), the Bland decision and discredited Liverpool Care Pathway practices have been justified and increased by this ruling.
Another young man, badly injured like Tony Bland in the Hillsborough disaster, and deemed to be persistently unresponsive, heard his mother insist to hospital staff that they continue his treatment and was so grateful to hear this. He eventually recovered.
Food and fluid are basic human rights. The Mental Capacity Act, incredibly, defines “treatment” as: any “diagnostic or other procedure”. This opens the door to inhumane practice, where the basic needs of a vulnerable person are considered dispensible and denied them when they have no chance to express hunger and thirst.
Defeatist healthcare gives way to demands for the death of the vulnerable. Their deaths can be very convenient in straitened economic times with fallible human beings making decisions.
The following principle should be morally binding: to kill or make an attempt on the life of an innocent person, is an evil action.
The slippery slope takes over when ideology trumps positive medicine and true patient advocacy. Teresa Lynch
Pro-life Nurses London W6