Baroness Whitaker
Main Page: Baroness Whitaker (Labour - Life peer)(1 day, 8 hours ago)
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Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I would like to introduce my Amendment 664. It is designed to ensure not only that no medical professional is obliged to participate in such training but that, in order to do so, the medical professional must give written consent. Professional training aims to show students not only how to apply their academic knowledge in practice but how to approach their role in their chosen profession. The second element has two levels. There is the day-to-day one, as summed up by the Cambridge clinical course under the labels “communication skills” and “patient management”: how, for instance, to deal with a patient who insists, contrary to the evidence, that they have cancer?
However, there is a second, higher level—an induction into the ethos of the profession. This level is of vital importance in training medical professionals, because they are dealing with human beings. Throughout this Committee, one of the most powerful messages has been that each individual is different and that one of the most precious skills of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals is to be sensitive to those differences when applying medical science in a particular case. There is no simple blueprint or checklist to guide them. Rather, they need to be guided by the ethos of the profession into which their training has induced them.
That is a strong reason why this amendment seeks to ensure that the training of health professionals related to assisted suicide needs explicit consent from participants. It implies that training for purposes of the Bill is treated as a separate activity within the course as a whole, requiring consent from the participants, and that there is neither compulsion nor pressure to participate. If assisting suicide or assisting death under this Bill is presented in training as just another element among others of what health professionals do, the ethos will be drastically changed. Instead of one based on supporting the ill, the frail and the elderly, of seeing in every life one worth living and improving health, a new ethos will grow. At first, it will be one of moral equivalence between encouragement and help to live and encouragement and help to die—one in which there is no ethical basis for the profession but everything depends on the apparent preferences of the patient. But soon, I fear, it will develop into something more sinister—an ethos in which medical professionals are servants of the state, deciding for the common good, as they believe, who is to live and who is to die.
A second reason for this amendment is the freedom of conscience of medical and other healthcare professionals.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
I am just finishing. I will not take interventions.
A second reason for the amendment, which would require written opt-in for training for medical and other health and care professionals, is that to many—not just in this House but in society as a whole—assisting suicide is deeply immoral and it would be obnoxious to have to train in practising it.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
May I check that I have understood the noble Baroness correctly? When she said that the patient’s preference should not prevail if they wanted an assisted death but that the doctor should decide, does she mean that the doctor knows best? Is that what she meant?
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for this. I am talking about medical professionals, and I am also talking about the moral equivalence. Can she remind me where I exactly said that?