My Lords, I stated earlier that I saw merit in the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, because they took doctors out of the gatekeeping role. I would like to expand on that briefly now.
The advantage of an independent medical expert is that you will know that you have somebody who has been properly trained, whose assessments are audited and, where there is a monitoring in the process, that they have to be updated in that area and discipline—and that they carry credentials, as well as being able to negotiate the court process. As part of that assessment, it seems essential that others affected by the death are also considered in the process, in particular children. I have spoken before in this House about the problems for children who are bereaved. I do not think that the House should underestimate the emotional problems for a child whose parent has committed suicide or had an assisted suicide, or the difficulties that they may go on to feel: that their love was inadequate to support the person who they loved—their parent—through the last days, weeks or months of their life, and how damaging that can be for the rest of their lives.
I also strongly support the concept of having a court-appointed person who could take the drugs out to the person who has gone through the process and for whom assisted suicide is being agreed. The way that the Bill of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is written at the moment is completely impractical because in reality not all patients die rapidly on ingesting their drugs. Some die within minutes but the median time is actually 25 minutes, if we base it on the Oregon experience. However, some take 41 hours to die. That is going to tie people up for a very long time.
We are not talking about therapeutic drugs but about a massive overdose of a drug at a fixed point. Later we will come on to debate lethal drugs and the difference between those and medication. There can also be monitoring of who the drugs go to when they go out, and the return of drugs to a central point if they have not been used—as well as having someone who is trained to deal with the complications that occur, which has not been addressed and which, I respectfully point out to the House, almost no doctors are equipped to cope with at the moment. Yes, they may learn, but that would be at the expense of patients.
The other reason why I see the merit of having a completely independent process of assessment is, as I
said before, that it does not contaminate the care that is being given to the person by the clinicians. It allows conversations to go on without the patient feeling that they have locked themselves in—that in a way they can pursue a parallel track. They can be assessed by the court but they can still have their own practitioner working to improve their quality of life, not believing that, now they are applying to fix a date for their death, some of the interventions feel pointless and futile.