Assisted suicide bill endangers elderly and confused, worries expert

Current proposals to legalise assisted suicide could leave older frail people at risk, an expert on dementia has warned.

Professor June Andrews OBE said last week’s parliamentary debate left her feeling that Kim Leadbeater’s controversial Bill “could leave vulnerable people in an increasingly vulnerable situation”.

Parliamentarians, legal experts, palliative care specialists, ethicists and newspaper columnists are among those continuing to raise serious concerns about the implications and workability of the backbench MP’s proposals.

Ill-conceived

Prof Andrews said: “Whether you agree or not with state-sanctioned killing, there is a fundamental problem here: the bill, as it stands, is unlikely to be a solution to the situations legislators fear.”

She explained that many patients “at risk of the type of bad death” in stories related by MPs on Friday would not meet the Bill’s criteria for assisted suicide: a six-month prognosis and mental capacity.

Not only would the law fail to help them, she continued, it “will create risk for others”.

The expert added: “Some of the people who could be affected are those I work with. I worry about people with dementia in the future.”

‘Mission creep’

She also worried “that the risk to older people of mission creep is easily ignored”, and expressed real concern that the decision to ask for help to die could be made “without psychiatric or social assessment or family consultation”.

She feared that “bad decisions will be made” and that “dying without family support” might be a very real and tragic consequence of the Bill.

Prof Andrews concluded: “If this Bill does become a path that we follow, we will have to be really careful and really specific about what assisted dying means, in a way that the current wording isn’t.

“The danger is that we may end up having something dangerous that we didn’t think we were asking for.”