Lives could be ”tragically cut short” if assisted suicide becomes law, palliative care specialists have warned, after Government figures revealed patients who are given six months to live frequently survive for a further three years.
According to data obtained by The Telegraph through a freedom of information request, a fifth of people claiming benefits who were thought to have six months left to live were still alive three years later.
Patients who are thought to have twelve months or less to live by their doctors are entitled to be fast-tracked onto universal credit.
The data shows that out of 360 who were given this benefit in 2017, 70 (19%) were still alive in 2020. In 2021, 420 of 1,980 claimants (21%) who received this benefit in 2018 were still alive. In 2022, 820 of 4,020 claimants (20%) who were given this benefit in 2019 were still alive. In 2023, 960 of 5,430 claimants (18%) who had been awarded this benefit in 2020 were still alive.
Predicting life expectancy is often inaccurate
The figures are important because the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, voted through at Second Reading on Friday 29 November, applies to adults who are thought to have fewer than six months to live.
A number of medical professionals have already spoken about the problems in accurately predicting how long a patient will live. As Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill proceeds through its next stage, and following the publication of the Telegraph data, Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary of the Association for Palliative Medicine, warned of the dangers of putting too much faith in the six-month provision in the Leadbeater assisted suicide Bill. He said “Under assisted dying laws … lives would have been tragically cut short – and we would never have known”.
“Can we accept a reality where one in five people might miss three more Christmases with loved ones due to the inherent uncertainty of medical prognoses?”.
“This stark truth exposes the misconception that prognosis is a safeguard: in practice, it comes down to the doctor’s discretion. How can you trust a so-called ‘safeguard’ which consistently and dramatically fails in being safe?”.
In a post on X, he added “Prognosis in the assisted dying bill is not a safeguard as it consistently is wildly wrong, therefore it does not ‘safe’ guard anyone”.
Data “not surprising to any clinician”
Professor Katherine Sleeman, a specialist in palliative care, echoed Doré’s concerns, saying the data was “not surprising to any clinician [b]ut pretty relevant to the [assisted suicide Bill]”.
In the build-up to the vote for the Leadbeater Bill, Sleeman told The Telegraph “It is not possible to accurately determine someone’s prognosis as a number of months, say six months or 12 months”.
“As a doctor, patients do ask me, ‘How long have I got left?’ and I would never say, ‘Six months or fewer.’ I might say, ‘Your prognosis is probably measured in months, or “long months”.’ That’s as precise as I would be”.
“When someone has only a few days, or certainly only a few hours left to live, it can be easier to understand with a higher degree of certainty that they’re likely to die within that time-frame. But when we’re getting into the territory of months, it is very, very difficult”.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a former professor of palliative medicine said “Predicting life expectancy is impossible… I have known people who live well and actively for years after they were thought to have no more than a few weeks to live”.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “This data confirms what senior professors of palliative care and oncology have been saying for a long time – the six-month life-expectancy limit for those seeking assisted suicide is a poor safeguard”.
“Under the Bill, we could expect as many as a fifth of those granted assisted suicide to have a life expectancy that goes far beyond six months. This is yet another problem with the Bill and yet another reason it must be scrapped immediately”.
