GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Assisted suicide makes good economic sense, argue Scottish academics

lunes, 16 de marzo de 2020

BioEdge: Assisted suicide makes good economic sense, argue Scottish academics

BioEdge: Assisted suicide makes good economic sense, argue Scottish academics

Bioedge

Assisted suicide makes good economic sense, argue Scottish academics

by Michael Cook | 15 Mar 2020 | 1 comment

A new study in the journal Clinical Ethics claims that permitting assisted dying would substantially benefit both those seeking assisted suicide and the public.

Two Scottish academics, Dr David Shaw of the Universities of Basel and Maastricht, and Professor Alec Morton of the University of Strathclyde, posit three economic arguments: the cost to terminally-ill patients of a poor quality of life, the cost of care that could be better used elsewhere and potential benefits to organ donation (PDF here).

Dr Shaw, the lead author, said: “Some people might suggest that it is callous to consider assisted dying from the perspective of resource management; these are real people with real lives. This criticism is misplaced. Part of the motivation for our argument is precisely that these are real people with real lives who wish to avoid suffering.

The first argument is that it enables consenting patients to avoid negative ‘quality-adjusted life years’ (QALYS).

QALYs are a measurement of disease burden which encompasses the quality and quantity of life lived which is used by health professionals to determine the value of health outcomes.

Second, resources consumed by patients who are denied assisted dying could instead be used to provide additional QALYs for patients elsewhere who wish to continue living and improve their quality of life.

Third, organ donation may provide an additional source of QALYs in this context.

The authors argue that, together, the avoidance of negative QALYs and gain in positive QALYs suggests permitting assisted dying would substantially benefit both the small population that seeks assisted suicide and the larger general population.

They argue that denying assisted dying is a lose-lose situation for all patients.

In the paper the authors write:

“Quality-adjusted life years have been used for decades in healthcare allocation decision-making.

“By combining quality of life and mortality into one metric, they enable quantification of the medical gains and losses and relative financial costs of a vast diversity of treatments and interventions, in turn enabling these different treatments to be compared against each other and funding decisions to be made.

“Organ donation could also benefit because there are several reasons why donation after assisted dying is better from a clinical and economic perspective.

“First, if patients are denied assisted dying, organ function will gradually deteriorate until they die naturally, meaning that transplantation is less likely to be successful. Second, patients who choose assisted dying have to go through a lengthy process, and organ donation can be easily integrated into that process, non-coercively, decreasing the risk that family members will attempt to overrule donation, which often occurs when a patient dies in a way that is not planned.

“The legal arrangements for assisted dying vary widely from country to country, and if the UK was to legalise assisted dying (presumably in the form of assisted suicide) the calculations here could be made more precise based on the specifics of the approach under consideration. Nevertheless, our paper shows in general that denying dying plausibly imposes great costs on both patients who wish to die and those who do not.

“However, our argument is not that legalisation of assisted dying should be primarily based on economic arguments; these are supplemental facts that should not be neglected. Legalising assisted dying in the UK is likely to yield a substantial increase in QALYs across the patient population as a whole.”

Dr Gordon Macdonald, of the lobby group Care Not Killing, which opposes assisted suicide, said: “This report is highly disturbing. It highlights the dangers of legalising euthanasia. Very quickly the argument moves from that of personal autonomy to doctors and nurses making value judgments about the quality of other people’s lives while seeking to save money and tackle so-called ‘bed blocking’ in health services.”

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

Most of today’s newsletter is devoted to the coronavirus outbreak. Send us some feedback.

Two countries at the epicentre of the outbreak are particularly interesting in their response to the crisis. Taiwan has reported 50 cases and one death. Even though it is so close to China, Korea and Japan, it has the lowest incidence per capita in the world at the moment — around 1 in every 500,000 people.

The measures Taiwan has taken have been extraordinarily effective – and apparently ignored by the international community. Why? Because Taiwan is not a member of the World Health Organization. It was forced out by the People’s Republic of China for longstanding historical and political reasons. Now the rest of the world is paying the price for WHO’s weakness.

As an op-ed in USA Today argues, Taiwan ought to be admitted to the WHO, even it if puts China’s nose out of joint. “Pandemics don’t care about human politics,” says Mia Ping-Chieh Chen.

The other country is North Korea. “The infectious disease did not flow into our country yet,” says a government newspaper. That is an astonishing achievement – no cases, no deaths. It’s better by far than Taiwan.