As MPs prepare for crucial votes on the assisted dying bill, concerns about its flaws emerge. Advocates argue for patient choice, but the reality shows a lack of equivalent rights to palliative care. With over 600,000 deaths annually in the UK, many terminally ill patients do not receive adequate care. The current system reflects a postcode lottery where access varies drastically. Delaying the vote until the recommendations of a recent commission on end-of-life care are enacted could help rectify the imbalance, ensuring that dignity and choice in dying do not overshadow the necessity of high-quality palliative support.
It has become clear that passing the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill into law would privilege the legal right to assisted dying without guaranteeing high-quality palliative care.
There is no effective freedom to choose if the alternative option, the freedom to draw on high-quality end-of-life care, is not available.
Patients will feel under pressure to relieve their relatives of the burden of caring for them, a form of coercion that prioritising good end-of-life care would diminish.
Access to palliative care is perhaps the country's worst and least defensible postcode lottery, with a person's fate depending on their geographical location.
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