15-05-2025
The answer to suffering is compassionate care, not state-assisted dying
SIR – I work as a nurse in a hospice that is currently celebrating 120 years of service to the people of the East End of London.
The care – including pain control – that our patients receive is outstanding. Through such care, the whole team ensures that patients have a good death.
I cannot support the proposals to introduce assisted dying (Letters, May 15).
Mary Moore
London E2
SIR – I commenced my career as a nurse in the NHS in 1962, and retired in 2017.
In the early days, I did not witness patients dying in agony. Doctors prescribed appropriate pain relief, and would oversee its careful administration by nurses. Patients died peacefully.
Things changed, however, after Harold Shipman's murders. I would also argue that alterations to the way nurses are trained have resulted in a loss of skills in the area of end-of-life care.
However, the idea of assisted dying goes against everything that the medical and nursing professions stand for.
Maureen Hamilton
Redcar, North Yorkshire
SIR – Palliative care does not lessen the need for the option of an assisted death.
My late cousin died aged nearly 97, having received superb care. He and I were close and talked over the phone for years. In the last two years of his life, during every chat, he would ask plaintively: 'Why won't they let me die?'
I can cite similar cases, the most shatteringly traumatic of which was that of my late mother.
Long before a massive stroke reduced this highly intelligent woman to an utterly dependant husk, she'd made clear her wishes. In the event, however, exemplary palliative care prolonged her miserable existence and postponed her death by a completely unwanted three years.
Anne Jappie
Cheltenham Gloucestershire
SIR – Since assisted dying was introduced progressively from 2019 into all states of Australia, about 2,500 people have chosen to make use of it.
The system is rigorously controlled, and applicants have three interviews with medical and psychological experts.
To date, there have been no recorded instances of the system failing to do the job it was designed for – namely, allowing an individual to take their own life, on their own terms and in their own time (usually in their home, surrounded by friends and relatives).
Phillip Mason
Torquay, Queensland, Australia
