Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)

Unfortunately, I am not sure that the noble Lord heard me right. The panels that we discussed previously did not include the treating clinicians—they were to look at the evidence brought to them. In the panel structure that I am proposing, the panel would have access to all the patient’s notes—with their permission—all their investigations, the full assessment of capacity and all other aspects that would be happening in routine practice during the patient’s care. Concerns over the patient’s family and behaviours during the course of their illness would be documented in the clinical record, along with the criteria on which the diagnosis was made, and that clinical record would be available to the panel. That is why I have suggested that there needs to be an expert with knowledge of the specific disease afflicting the person who is seeking an assisted death. There are many rare conditions in medicine; common things occur commonly, but rare things are not that uncommon, and it is quite common for there to be a misdiagnosis that may lead to the patient making a decision based on the fallacy that they have an illness they may even have been treated for. We heard evidence in a previous Select Committee that, at post-mortem, around 5% of people are found to have died of something different from what had been recorded on the death certificate, suggesting that misdiagnosis is, sadly, not a very rare occurrence.