Accompanied suicide – when is it okay to allow a terminally ill patient to die?
Hello! My name is Beth and I am a final year MPharm student at Kingston University. From a young age I have had quite an interest in the right to die and palliative care – mainly due to my cousin, Charley, who passed away at 5 years old from Neuroblastoma. A few months before she passed, she told her mum that she wanted to die to end her pain. This has always resonated with me and it made me wonder how many other people have wanted to end their lives in this way, so I researched and found so many other stories similar to Charley’s. As a future pharmacist, I started to wonder about what the role of the pharmacist would be in accompanied suicide and what would be expected of us. I realised that I wanted to discover the views of other future pharmacists on this topic, and it was here that my dissertation was born.
Every year there are around 572,000 people dying in the UK, of which around 75% (430,000) of these people will require some form of palliative care and would therefore be deemed as terminally ill. In the UK there are also 300 terminally ill people a year who kill themselves and every 8 days someone from the UK will go to Switzerland in order to end their life. The ongoing debate on whether to accept accompanied suicide/voluntary euthanasia in the UK is clearly a big issue for many patients whose last wish is to end their suffering.
This study will be determining the opinions of final year Pharmacy students on the topic of accompanied suicide, and how comfortable they would feel dispensing lethal medication using several case studies involving terminally ill patients who wish to end their lives in this fashion. It will also be determining specific factors that may influence the opinion of the participants on accompanied suicide. Such factors could be patient related (i.e. the patient’s age, illness, mental capacity), or participant related (i.e. the participant’s religion, postal code, gender).
The cross-sectional study involves an anonymous, online survey which can be accessed via SurveyMonkey and requires final year MPharm students from each of the four London universities involved – Kingston University, Kings College London, Hertfordshire University, and University College London (UCL). Final year students were chosen to participate in the study because they will have the most experience in Pharmacy teaching and will therefore most likely be more educated on palliative care and possibly even accompanied suicide. Similar studies have involved pharmacists, however never in pharmacy students, therefore this study will enable the future generation of pharmacists’ voices to be heard.
To access the survey, please follow the link below:
