Let’s Not Fix the NHS by Killing the Patients

The NHS is 76 years old – and crumbling. How can waiting lists be cut, and the whole system made more efficient? As someone who has been on a waiting list since January, I have more than just a theoretical interest in the question. Wouldn’t the whole thing be a lot more efficient if there were less people in the system? One shortcut to achieving that may turn out to be ‘assisted dying’. Liam McArthur MSP introduced such a bill here in March, which will be discussed soon. South of the border, Keir Starmer seems ready to fast-track a similar one through the Commons. It would give adults who are terminally ill, with a life expectancy of less than six months, an option to end their lives with medical assistance.

Starmer is ’personally committed’ to changing the law and voted to do so in 2015. Other key figures in his party are less sure. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said it is a dangerous ideas which she couldn’t back. According to a 2020 British Medical Association survey, only 10 percent of palliative care doctors would prescribe drugs to assist suicide, while 76 percent would not. The 2,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath – long considered the gold standard of medical ethics – contains the pledge: ‘Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course’. It certainly seems ironic that, just a few years after the world shut down to protect the vulnerable, medics could be given authority to help end the lives of some of the same people. Read the rest of this article written by Rev. Stephen Steele for a local paper by clicking here.