Assisted suicide panel: Social workers ‘already at capacity’

Social workers are already “at capacity”, Kim Leadbeater has been warned, as she advocates for them to be part of a multidisciplinary panel for her assisted suicide proposals.

After axing her ‘ultimate safeguard’ of a High Court judge’s approval of a person’s request to be killed, Leadbeater is seeking to fix her controversial assisted suicide Bill by introducing a three-member panel, comprising of a social worker, lawyer and psychiatrist.

A spokesperson for the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) has highlighted staff shortages across England, and said more resources would need to be given to the field for social workers to take on any extra work such as sitting on the proposed panels.

Already stretched

Luke Geoghegan, BASW Head of Policy and Research, raised his concerns about the strain this would put on the three professions: “This is not a bolt-on to existing services. This is something qualitatively different.

“Not only would you be having to fund the staff from a range of professions, but you’d also have to be doing profession-specific training. This would be new to all of us.”

He explained that social workers are already stretched, and have “lots of responsibilities and not enough resources”.

A 2023 survey found that 46 per cent of BASW members identified staff shortages as one of their biggest workplace challenges, with around half reporting feeling unable to manage their current workload. Two thirds of them believed assisted suicide would further impact their work.

Insufficient capacity

Professor Allan House, Emeritus Professor of Liaison Psychiatry at the University of Leeds, and Professor Gareth Owen, Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at King’s College London, recently argued that there are also too few psychiatrists to make the panels work.

Prof House told The Daily Telegraph: “Does psychiatry have the capacity for this? Well, one of the other things that the Royal College census shows is that, across the UK, 28 per cent of all consultant jobs are either vacant or filled by non-substantive staff. So you are asking a profession that can’t fill a quarter of its consultant jobs with full-time consultants if they want to release 30 people to do this work”.

The Royal College of Psychiatrist’s President, Dr Lade Smith, added: “We hope for further engagement with Parliamentarians on this Bill in the coming months as there are still a number of outstanding issues that need to be considered, including workforce shortages.”