Radio NZ News 20 April 2021
Family First Comment: Here comes a flawed dangerous regime with unintended adverse consequences (which the public weren’t fully informed about)…
“There have been concerns expressed internationally over … the concoction of medication that is used, that in some cases, has led to traumatic end of life experiences,”
Patients requesting euthanasia will be given unapproved, unregulated and “off label” medicines, sparking warnings of prolonged and distressing deaths.
People who chose to swallow or ingest the fatal medicines, rather than taking them intravenously, would be given drugs that were compounded (mixed up) by a pharmacist and provided to the patient without being approved by regulator Medsafe.
The Ministry of Health said those who opted for an injection would be given drugs which had been approved by Medsafe but for a different purpose – so the medicines will be provided for an unapproved, or “off label”, use.
Hundreds of pages of documentation, much of it heavily redacted, has been released under the Official Information Act to RNZ as part of an investigation into how prepared New Zealand is to introduce assisted dying.
Among the documents is an email from Dr Bryan Betty, medical director at the Royal New Zealand College of GPs, warning that mixing concoctions of drugs had led to traumatic deaths.
Dr Betty’s warning to the Ministry of Health used the example of American states not being able to access death penalty drugs due to cost and availability.
“So they made up their own concoctions initially, with examples of prolonged processes until fine-tuned. Belgium had a standard process but (this was) not used by many doctors for some years, also resulting in prolonged, distressing deaths.”
Betty said it was important to develop strong guidelines to avoid these situations.
“There have been concerns expressed internationally over … the concoction of medication that is used, that in some cases, has led to traumatic end of life experiences,” he said.
“I think we need to mitigate those risks upfront and be very prescriptive about what could be used and an end of life situation,” he said.
READ MORE: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/440824/distressing-death-warning-for-unregulated-euthanasia-drugs
