Death ‘assumption’ sparks euthanasia debate
Euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002 but a new study has found that half the subsequent deaths have involved patients who did not explicitly request that a doctor end their lives.
Nearly half of the nurses interviewed, 120 of 248, said they had taken part in “terminations without request or consent” and a fifth admitted they had been involved in the euthanasia of a patient based on the “assumption” that they wanted to die.
The Belgian study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal said that rules were often flouted and doctors delegated the administration of fatal drugs to nurses, despite the law stating that the patient must consent and that doctors must carry out the procedure.
“By administering the life-ending drugs in some of the cases of euthanasia,” the researchers said, “and in almost half of the cases without an explicit request from the patient, the nurses in our study operated beyond the legal margins of their profession”.
