This is a concern

Readers will know I am a supporter of the End of Life Choice Act. In fact I was an active campaigner for it. I think it has provided much needed choice to many New Zealanders who were terminally ill.

But this story from the Herald is a concern:

Two members of a committee tasked with ensuring assisted deaths complied with the law say the oversight process was so inadequate they would not have known if someone had died wrongly.

The former End of Life Review Committee members said they were “extremely concerned” about how little information they received about patients’ deaths and raised it repeatedly with the Ministry of Health and successive Health Ministers.

When they complained about receiving assisted death reports with blank sections they were told by the ministry to assume nothing was wrong – a response which led one of the members to step down from the role. Another member described it as a “tick-box” exercise.

As I said I am a big supporter of the Act, but it is essential that the safeguards are rigorous and not seen as a tick-box exercise.

The two committee members occasionally attempted to raise what they felt were important issues but were told that this was not within the scope of their role.

Wensley became concerned about the unequal distribution of assisted deaths, noting that more of them were occurring in small, rural areas than anticipated. When she sought more data to “check her sense”, it was denied by the Assisted Dying Secretariat, she said in a letter to former Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

A Ministry of Health spokesperson said Wensley had raised an important equity question and officials had taken it seriously. But the relatively new service lacked enough data to draw conclusions about equity and access, and this would be investigated when a more robust dataset was available – likely to be several years.

The spokesperson also said that such an investigation was not within the committee’s responsibilities and that Wensley’s question had been passed to the ministry’s research team.

Maybe the review should look at changing the law so that such issues are within the committee’s responsibilities.