(The Times) – A palliative care doctor is called to A&E to attend to an elderly man who has arrived in severe pain with metastasised prostate cancer. “I just want to die,” he tells her. Yet when she sits with him, the doctor learns he lives alone and she is the first person to whom he has unburdened his fears. She prescribes morphine, puts in place what she calls “rudimentary palliative care” and two days later he goes home, no longer wanting to die.

This doctor, who works in a large city hospital, tells me she is not opposed to assisted dying, seeing it as a valid last resort for a small number of patients. She is under no illusions she can ease all suffering: she cannot, for example, end a motor neurone patient’s sense of incarceration in their own body. But she believes the choice to die should not be driven by lack of assistance to live, and is concerned that palliative care is too patchy and inadequate for many vulnerable people to make a truly free choice. (Read More)