IT’S OFFICIAL: physician-assisted death, where a doctor helps to introduce a patient to the Grim Reaper, does not mark the start of a slippery slope.

Opponents of the practice suggest that people in vulnerable groups – the elderly or people with disabilities, for example – are at risk wherever doctors are given licence to help patients on their way.

Indeed, in places such as Oregon in the United States, which allows physician-assisted suicide, there is evidence to suggest that, with legislation and regulation, such safeguards offer protection to patients rather than increasing the risk of their premature demise.

An editorial in BMJ (Sept 29) suggests that patients are more vulnerable in European countries where assisted death is illegal, than in the Netherlands, say, where physician-assisted death has been allowed for more than 25 years.

But for some patients, such arguments may be academic.

Why involve a doctor in hastening your death when NHS rationing can, apparently, do the job perfectly well?

One in six respondents to a survey conducted by Doctor (Sept 25) said that patients had died because of rationing of NHS drugs and resources.

Half the doctors surveyed felt that rationing had caused suffering to patients and many of the doctors had faced complaints as a result.

One respondent, a GP, said that healthcare is a lottery and that patients’ survival can depend on where they live.

Another described how a patient had died because a primary care trust’s ban on inter-consultant referrals had delayed treatment for cancer.

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