New guidance on how the General Medical Council (GMC) deals with complaints against doctors who may have helped patients commit suicide has been published today. Encouraging or assisting suicide is a criminal offence and our new guidance reflects the law. Niall Dickson, Chief Executive of the General Medical Council The guidance will help the GMC decide if a doctor should face a fitness to practise hearing if they are alleged to have helped a person to die.
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Campaigners fear assisted suicide is being legalised by the back door as record numbers of Britons end their lives at Dignitas – while their relatives escape investigation for helping them. The Swiss suicide clinic helped 33 people from this country to die last year – the highest ever annual figure – pushing the total during the past decade close to 250. But police passed only a handful of files to prosecutors over the assistance provided by loved ones, and no one was charged. A police worker even accompanied her mother to Switzerland but faced no sanction. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has recently issued new guidelines to every force in the country about how they should investigate assisted suicides. Although the document is restricted, this newspaper has been shown the section that deals with deaths abroad. It highlights how tough such inquiries can be because of the difficulty in obtaining evidence from foreign authorities.
The police service is responsible for investigating cases of encouraging or assisting suicide, whether the actual suicide takes place in the UK or abroad and whenever we receive information or intelligence about such a case, these investigations are pursued. Following renewed guidance from the CPS, ACPO has developed specific guidance for police officers investigating such cases. The guidance encourages investigators to engage with the CPS at the very early stages of an encouraged or assisted suicide inquiry. When the police are informed of suicides that have taken place abroad this involves enquiries that lead to consideration of jurisdictional issues which can be complicated by other nations legal systems. Furthermore the progress of any investigation in part relies on the co-operation of foreign police services and agencies. It also requires any UK police force to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt the circumstances under which the person died and this can be difficult...
Although DJ's condition is in many respects grim, I am not persuaded that treatment would be futile or overly burdensome, or that there is no prospect of recovery. (a) In DJ's case, the treatments in question cannot be said to be futile, based upon the evidence of their effect so far. (b) Nor can they be said to be futile in the sense that they could only return DJ to a quality of life that is not worth living. (c) Although the burdens of treatment are very great indeed, they have to be weighed against the benefits of a continued existence. (d) Nor can it be said that there is no prospect of recovery: recovery does not mean a return to full health, but the resumption of a quality of life that DJ would regard as worthwhile. The references, noted above, to a cure or a return to the former pleasures of life set the standard unduly high.