Is NZ ready for doctors and nurses who enjoy killing patients?

From November this year, New Zealand medical professionals will begin assisting patient suicides and deliberately ending patient lives with lethal doses.

These acts were cloaked in misleading euphemism during the public debate about this issue, and this has resulted in a dangerously utopian and fuzzy thinking about the safety concerns involved here.

When push comes to shove though, and the actual practice starts happening in our country, there will be no sanitising the fact that it will involve doctors and nurses deliberately ending the lives of patients.

The seismic nature of this change cannot be understated, in fact it is the most seismic change that has ever been undertaken in our legal and medical history.

One of the most troubling, but seldom discussed results of this change will be the issue of how to protect New Zealanders from medical practitioners who enjoy ending the lives of patients.

Short of the state forcing medical professionals who are opposed to euthanasia into the role of carrying out euthanasia, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ensure that patient safety is being prioritised by the executioners of the euthanasia regime.

You see, the very doctors and nurses who are most likely to adhere strictly to the legal safeguards, err on the side of caution, and take no pleasure in the deliberate ending of patient lives are the very same people who are opposed and want nothing to do with euthanasia.

Meanwhile, the very medical professionals who are more than happy to deliberately end the lives of their patients are the ones who are also more likely to flout legal safeguards, throw caution to the wind, and possibly even enjoy the act of ending patient lives.

It is not uncommon to hear of medical professionals relishing in this role by embracing a macabre celebrity about it, or even referring to themselves with grandiose titles like ‘doctor death’, ‘angel of mercy’, etc.

Just over two weeks ago media in Australia reported about the case of a Brisbane nurse who dubbed herself “the angel of death” and told colleagues that she was proud of euthanising an elderly woman with a lethal overdose.

Astoundingly, even though she has been reprimanded by a judicial tribunal, she will not face any criminal charges for deliberately killing that elderly woman.

This lack of meaningful legal repercussions happened in a jurisdiction (Queensland) where euthanasia is currently illegal, and where there should therefore have been no question at all about whether criminal charges should have ensued.

If that can happen where euthanasia is currently illegal, imagine how unlikely it is to see legal accountability properly enforced in this country now that we have given doctors and nurses the legal power to kill or assist in patient suicides.

The tragic reality is that once that act is normalised and glamourised, the will of our legal system to prosecute those who flout the law while engaged in such acts will be severely weakened, if not completely diminished.

There’s nothing surprising about this either - this is the general norm in the minority of other places overseas that have legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide as well.

On a side note, the fact that the Australian case involved a nurse brings to mind a study of serial murders by healthcare professionals from 1970 to 2006 which found that “nursing personnel comprised 86% of the healthcare providers prosecuted” for this crime.

While the murder of patients by medical professionals is thankfully not a common occurrence, there is no denying that legalised euthanasia will now make it much easier for such predators to operate under a cloak of legitimacy in our healthcare system.

And this is to say nothing of doctors, nurses and a medical establishment that becomes desensitised to the act of deliberate patient killing to such a degree that violating important legal safeguards in the process doesn’t register meaningful concern or result in proper accountability. 

Not only does all of this cause an erosion of patient safety and an increase in risk to the vulnerable, but it seems likely that it will only be a matter of time before a predatory actor who takes pleasure from killing patients inserts themselves into our euthanasia regime.

Supporters of euthanasia will no doubt want to scoff at such a suggestion, but it seems that this would be a denial of the true reality of human nature and just how serious the stakes will become in our country after November this year.