I’ve written before about end-of-life issues. They’re never easy to make, either for the patient, or the patient’s loved ones.
In the BBC today, I spotted this article entitled Quality of Death Index – something to celebrate?. It reminded me of an Introduction to Philosophy course I took during my first year at uni.
My Intro to Philosophy prof once gave a number of lectures about “The Happiness Index” – that is, a number of factors on the individual’s and also larger society’s scales concerning well-being, life expectancy, satisfaction with work and family, etc. (Frustratingly, this was also a course which didn’t have a textbook, so in that, I can remember that it was a VERY good course, but all I have are my lecture notes in Winnipeg somewhere.)
Source:LiveScience
So, I knew there was a Happiness Index out there – and indeed there are more than one with a few clicks of Google – but I was also surprised to find a similar set of data: The “Quality of Death Index”. It’s less surprising the more I read about it, because why shouldn’t we be able to be as happy or contented about the choices we make when we are dying as we do when we’re alive?
However, there is one glaring omission in this article: physician-assisted suicide is illegal in the UK, so people who wish to have some control over how much they suffer when they are dying are forced to go abroad, sometimes away from their families and at great monetary and perhaps even legal cost to their families.
The NHS crows about current terminal patient care much too loudly for my taste. While excellent hospice care is definitely a good thing, there are always going to be patients who would not want to languish for years in that sort of setting, and who are going to travel in search of physician-assisted suicide. In many cases, the travel costs alone prevent a terminal patient seeking a physician’s assistance in countries where euthanasia is legal.
