Colin Brewer, Marie-Claire Hopwood, Graham Winyard
{"title":"Assisted deaths in Switzerland for UK residents: diagnoses and their implications for palliative medicine and assisted dying legislation.","authors":"Colin Brewer, Marie-Claire Hopwood, Graham Winyard","doi":"10.1136/spcare-2023-004719","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Objective: </strong>UK campaigners for a law permitting assisted dying (AD) restricted to those with a maximum life expectancy of 6 months claim that this would largely remove the need for UK residents to seek AD in Switzerland. We wanted to discover whether this prediction was correct.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>We analysed the diagnoses of UK residents who had such deaths including, for the first time, data from all three of the main Swiss providers of AD to non-residents, comparing them with figures from Oregon, which has a 6-month restriction.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Only 22.7% of UK residents had cancer (Oregon 72.5%) while nearly half (49.6% and over half including dementias) had neurological conditions (Oregon 11.2%) and many with prognoses of much more than 6 months.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>Overall, less than half would meet a 6-month prognosis criterion. This has significant implications for patients, palliative care clinicians and legislators.</p>","PeriodicalId":9136,"journal":{"name":"BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care","volume":" ","pages":"259-261"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2023-004719","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Objective: UK campaigners for a law permitting assisted dying (AD) restricted to those with a maximum life expectancy of 6 months claim that this would largely remove the need for UK residents to seek AD in Switzerland. We wanted to discover whether this prediction was correct.
Methods: We analysed the diagnoses of UK residents who had such deaths including, for the first time, data from all three of the main Swiss providers of AD to non-residents, comparing them with figures from Oregon, which has a 6-month restriction.
Results: Only 22.7% of UK residents had cancer (Oregon 72.5%) while nearly half (49.6% and over half including dementias) had neurological conditions (Oregon 11.2%) and many with prognoses of much more than 6 months.
Conclusion: Overall, less than half would meet a 6-month prognosis criterion. This has significant implications for patients, palliative care clinicians and legislators.
期刊介绍：
Published quarterly in print and continuously online, BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care aims to connect many disciplines and specialties throughout the world by providing high quality, clinically relevant research, reviews, comment, information and news of international importance.
We hold an inclusive view of supportive and palliative care research and we are able to call on expertise to critique the whole range of methodologies within the subject, including those working in transitional research, clinical trials, epidemiology, behavioural sciences, ethics and health service research. Articles with relevance to clinical practice and clinical service development will be considered for publication.
In an international context, many different categories of clinician and healthcare workers do clinical work associated with palliative medicine, specialist or generalist palliative care, supportive care, psychosocial-oncology and end of life care. We wish to engage many specialties, not only those traditionally associated with supportive and palliative care. We hope to extend the readership to doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers and researchers in medical and surgical specialties, including but not limited to cardiology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, neurology, oncology, paediatrics, primary care, psychiatry, psychology, renal medicine, respiratory medicine.
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