(The Spectator) – The hospice movement is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain. Inspired by the doctor Cicely Saunders, who in effect founded the field of palliative care, it has united cutting-edge research with a profound understanding of suffering and how to relieve it. Britain’s hundreds of hospices are Saunders’s legacy.

But can that legacy survive an assisted suicide law? ‘It has the potential to destroy the sector in its entirety,’ says Amy Proffitt, former president of the Association for Palliative Medicine (APM). If assisted suicide is integrated into palliative care, and hospices legally must facilitate it, then ‘many of the medical profession would leave the sector entirely’, Proffitt adds. Dr Dominic Whitehouse, a consultant at a Sussex hospice speaking in a personal capacity, tells me the bill would be ‘the death knell’ for hospices. (Read More)