Dr Zubir Ahmed

Not at the moment. It is on the foundational principles of the Bill that I primarily want to concentrate today. The first is the idea of a “six months to live” label. “Terminal illness” is a fast-changing medical diagnosis in the modern medical world, and it is becoming an increasingly meaningless term. Only yesterday evening, I was in the company of a professor of respiratory medicine who, with rightful satisfaction, told me that many of his stage 4 lung cancer patients who were designated with six months to live in 2023 are being managed as having a chronic disease in 2026. In my practice, if a patient comes to see me with stage 4 colon cancer that has spread to their liver, the advent of immunotherapy means that I have an equal chance of telling them they have six months to live or six years to live. Under this law, when I meet that kind of patient, it is unclear to me, with the Supreme Court precedents around consent, whether I should be offering them immunotherapy and an assisted death at the same sitting. A six-month prognosis will take a new and unhealthy salience in every clinical conversation. It will be a label some will desire, and others will want at all costs to avoid being placed on their clinical record. It will fundamentally change and undermine the candidness and sanctity of the patient-doctor conversation and relationship.