The BMA Consultants Conference has voted through a strongly worded motion that states that Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill raises “serious potential moral hazards for consultants and serious potential adverse impacts on health services” and that assisted suicide is “not a health activity”.
Introduced by the Southern regional consultants committee, the motion (46) demanded an “opt-in model is adopted for providers, and no consultant shall be expected to be involved in any part of the assisted [suicide] process, including having no obligation to either suggest assisted [suicide] to patients, nor refer patients for it”.
“The state will be asking medical practitioners to cross a huge red line in medical ethics”
Speaking in favour of the motion, Palliative Medicine consultant Dr Dominic Whitehouse underlined the significant changes the Bill would present if it became law. He said “If [the Leadbeater Bill] becomes law, it will herald the biggest change to our practice as consultants we’ll ever see”.
“The state will be asking medical practitioners to cross a huge red line in medical ethics, no longer being expected to do no harm or to never administer a poison to our patients. We will instead be the ones to provide lethal medication for our patients to kill themselves”.
Whitehouse was highly critical of the Committee, led by Kim Leadbeater, scrutinising the Bill because it “keeps moving the goalposts, refusing to hear verbal testimony from those with a legitimate interest, giving insufficient time to read the written evidence, ignoring the opinions of experts and making huge changes to the Bill as they go along”.
Whitehouse made reference to a 2020 BMA survey that revealed that 54% of doctors would not be willing to participate actively in the process of administering life-ending drugs. Only 26% said they would be willing, and 20% were undecided.
He added “We also know that those most against it are those who largely look after dying patients: GPs, geriatricians, palliative care specialists, oncologists and hospital[…]physicians”.
Criticism of Leadbeater committee ignoring “palliative care specialist input”
Whitehouse was also critical of the lack of input from palliative care experts to the assisted suicide Committee, saying “We know hospices and palliative care are in crisis as well, closing beds, cutting services and making staff redundant due to inadequate Government funding. Already 100,000 people per year die in the UK without adequate end of life care, but despite all this the Bill Committee do not require any palliative care specialist input to assisted dying decisions”.
88% voted in support of part one of the motion to ensure assisted suicide in opt-in, and only 9% voted against, while 3% abstained.
52% voted in support of part two of the motion, which said that assisted suicide “is not a health activity”, 41% voted against and 7% abstained.
The Consultants’ strongly worded motion comes as the member-wide survey of the Royal College of General Practitioners has revealed there has been a significant drop in support among GPs for introducing assisted suicide since 2019.
The survey showed a large decrease in the percentage of members who said that the RCGP should support assisted suicide being legal, subject to an appropriate regulatory framework and safeguarding processes, from 40% in 2019 to 33.7% in 2025.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson, said “The passing of this vote shows that NHS consultants have no desire to either suggest assisted suicide to patients nor refer patients for it. Their strongly worded warning, that Kim Leadbeater’s Bill raises ‘serious moral hazards to consultants’ and could have ‘serious potential adverse impacts’ on UK health services, should not be dismissed”.
“It’s essential that time and resources are now put into palliative care rather than assisted suicide, and the Bill should be voted down at Third Reading”.
