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HEALTH experts have warned MPs that calls for the NHS to fund assisted suicide while leaving palliative care to the charity sector were “bonkers” and amounted to the “state endorsing death.”
The health committee’s assisted suicide inquiry heard the proposals would be a risk to public safety and contradictory to hospices’ “ethos” of valuing patients’ wellbeing.
Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain honorary secretary Dr Matthew Doreand Ireland said: “This is a public safety issue because if you legalise this you are going to risk the wider majority of the population.
“The ethos of palliative care is to alleviate suffering; you imbue a value and worth and safety on that person.
“If you have a whisper in someone’s ear, maybe it’s not worth living, the contradiction of the ethos is there. What happens is healthcare becomes subservient to assisted suicide, it shrinks or becomes stagnant.”
He said: “We’ve got the acceptance of a charitably funded sector which is going to breed an element of inequality because it’s feeding from its donations as opposed to a state funded system which is I think is what we all really, really want.
“It’s bonkers that we talking about having an assisted suicide Bill which will be 100 per cent funded by the NHS when we leave palliative care to be funded by the charitable sector — that is the state essentially endorsing death while not funding and paying for palliative care.”
Chief medical director of the Sue Ryder charity, Dr Paul Perkins, told the commitee: “I’m constantly surprised that, as a society, it’s OK to sell second-hand cardigans for us to be able to look after seriously ill people.
“The palliative medical workforce in this country are not in favour of assisted dying.”