Assisted dying: sorry you don't qualify.

It's a great law that helps many terminally ill patients, but overwrought fears that never materialised have meant lots of real-life suffering for patients who get turned down. Arbitrarily.

20 percent of patients seeking assisted dying get turned down. 65-73% of them because a doctor wouldn’t write down that they were likely to die within 6 months. Ironically, and tragically, some of those very same patients died within 6 months.

The reality is doctors are only slightly accurate when death is very near (less than 2 weeks) or very far off (more than 12 months). In between those extremes, we doctors basically stink at prognosticating.

There have been about 1000 assisted deaths in 3 years, around 1% of NZ deaths. Part of the problem is an overly restrictive 6 month requirement mandated by the Green Party in order to pass the law. As is often the case with any fearmongered issue, especially, assisted dying, the fear of ‘theoretically’ harming someone was vastly outweighed in real life by the ‘actual’ occurrence of harming someone: all those terminally ill patients that couldn’t get assisted dying because they might die in 7, 8, 9, or 12 months.