MPs at a public bill committee on England’s assisted dying bill last week (January 29) heard from Australian clinicians on their country’s “state-wide pharmacy service that delivers assisted dying drugs”.
The three witnesses included specialist palliative care physician Dr Greg Mewett, Royal Perth Hospital medical services deputy director Dr Clare Fellingham and oncologist Dr Cam McLaren.
McLaren told MPs that after a patient is “found eligible” for the service in the Australian state of Victoria, clinicians “can apply for a permit to prescribe the medication”.
Read more: Pharmacists must not ‘directly engage’ patients in assisted dying debate
“The permit will come back within three days and then we write a prescription, which goes to our centralised pharmacy service,” he added.
“The pharmacy will wait for the patient or the contact person to contact the pharmacy and organise the delivery or dispensing of the medication,” he said.
“Practical measures”
“In Victoria, self-administered oral medication will be dispensed to the patient and that is then their property; they may use it immediately or never use it - that is completely up to them,” McLaren said.
But if it is not used, the patient’s nominated contact person is “legally required to return the medication to the pharmacy”, he stressed.
Pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock asked the witnesses what “training, capacity building and practical measures” were needed after Australia’s assisted dying bill was passed.
Read more: Assisted dying bill reveals pharmacy tech role and opt-out clause
Dr Fellingham told Kinnock that the Australian department of health used eight different workstreams to look at “the pharmacology, the substance and what that was going to look like, the doses and how it was going to be administered, the set-up of the pharmacy and things like that”.
“I will not lie – it was an enormous task,” she added.
But she said that “a lot of fantastic groundwork has been laid already”, adding that “the vast majority” of laws across Australia and New Zealand are “similar to what [the UK government is] planning to legislate for in the United Kingdom”.
“Opt in” not “opt out”
It comes as the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) last week (January 28) revealed it has urged the bill committee to “reflect on a number of key issues” around the UK’s assisted dying bill after it passed its second reading stage.
The RPS said that “pharmacists and other health professionals should be able to ‘opt in’ to participating in aspects of assisted dying by completing the necessary training, rather than having to ‘opt out’.”
It added that pharmacists “must be protected from prosecution should they choose to participate in the approved process for an assisted dying procedure”.
Read more: Opinion: Assisted dying, and the importance of protecting conscience
“There must be no obligation for any pharmacist to participate in any aspect of assisted dying if they feel this is against their personal beliefs,” it stressed.
Meanwhile in November, all four UK chief pharmaceutical officers (CPhOs) wrote to pharmacists and pharmacy technicians warning them not to “directly” debate with patients about assisted dying.
And a C+D snap poll in August revealed that 74% of pharmacists were in favour of legalising assisted dying in some capacity.
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