MPs who voted in support of assisted dying — and indeed many doctors and other healthcare professionals who support such measures — may not have fully considered the profound practical challenges this would present for the NHS and for medical education and training.
Implementing an NHS-based assisted dying service would be a vast and complex undertaking. At present, the NHS is neither prepared nor equipped to deliver such a service in a safe, equitable, and ethical way. There is no public funding allocated for assisted dying. As Secretary of State Wes Streeting has rightly pointed out, any future funding would inevitably have to come at the expense of other health services that are already under considerable strain.
Beyond funding, the educational and professional implications for the medical workforce have barely been addressed. There has been no clear plan for how assisted dying would be integrated into undergraduate medical education or postgraduate clinical training — nor how issues of conscientious objection, professional standards, and clinical governance would be handled in practice. Integrating assisted dying into undergraduate education and postgraduate training would require new frameworks, ethical guidelines, and practical training modules. Developing these educational and training programmes would take years and require significant investment, with no clear plans for this currently in place.
The complexity of implementation—financially, educationally, and ethically—suggests that any move toward assisted dying would require far more planning than current discussions reflect. Without addressing these fundamental questions, any move toward legalising assisted dying risks creating more problems than it solves. Policymakers, healthcare leaders, doctors, other healthcare professionals and the public deserve a much fuller and more honest debate about what such a profound change would truly require.
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