Chamber and committees

How do you envisage the NHS working and functioning to provide an assisted dying service without amendment 257? Does that need to be in the bill? Would it not happen anyway?

Capacity is an individual matter. When it comes to medical interventions, there are 13-year-olds who can make a decision based on their particular ability to do so. It is different for everyone, and every person will be a case in point. I just think that the vast majority of people at 18 do have that full capacity and are able to make their own decisions.

I do not know whether members agree, but I said earlier that we need to start to think about, in the majority of cases, the question of what an adult is. Yes, development does go on in a person’s brain until the age of 25, but I do not believe that 25 is the right age, because plenty of 18-year-olds have the ability to make informed decisions. I think that that is the most important thing.

I declare an interest as a practising national health service general practitioner and chair of the medical advisory group on the bill.

I would like to say a number of things regarding the amendments in this group. On Jeremy Balfour’s comments, I think that we in Parliament should be cognisant that it is not up to us to tell people what meaningful life is or to tell people who are living their life what quality of life means, because it is different for everyone. One person’s quality of life is not the same as another’s. If somebody feels that their quality of life is bad, that they are not getting what they need and that they would like to go through the assisted dying process, we should not be saying, “No, that is not right—you could still live a bit longer, even though you are very unhappy with your quality of life.”

Will you clarify that point? Are you proposing that the assisted dying not be part of the NHS and thus, as Murdo Fraser has suggested, that we have a regulatory body for that?

I start by saying that this is not assisted suicide. This is assisted dying, as the bill puts it, but Mr Balfour has called it assisted suicide multiple times. That is a way of being very emotive, but I do not think that it is correct.

If somebody is diagnosed with motor neurone disease, we do not know what stage they are diagnosed at. They could be diagnosed at a critically horrible stage where they are struggling to breathe and it is a late diagnosis. Day 2 of that diagnosis is very different from day 2 of a diagnosis that is made when they are right at the start of the journey.

It is important that we, as parliamentarians, do not tell the people what meaningful life is.

We have already spoken about the difficulty, so I will not repeat that. If somebody has been diagnosed with a condition and they are struggling to breathe, they are having interminable anxiety, they are suffering, there is nothing that can be done for them palliatively to alleviate them and they have decided at that stage that they have no quality of life and they want to access assisted dying, without a six-month prognosis—if they have, say, a year left to live—we are leaving that person to suffer. I wonder what Mr Doris would say to such an individual.

I did not want to interrupt your flow.

There is very low uptake of anticipatory care plans among the general public. I would love everyone to have an anticipatory care plan, power of attorney and a will in place; that would be great, and it would be good practice for everyone. Again, however, it is an individual’s right to choose not to have that, no matter how good it would be for them.

Does Rhoda Grant agree that, in section 7(1)(a)(iii), the bill places a duty on registered medical professionals during the first declaration to discuss

“any palliative or other care available”

to such individuals, and that forcing them into something, despite having had a discussion about what could be available to them, might be a barrier?

I declare an interest as a practising NHS general practitioner.

Good morning, minister. You spoke about better data. There were 42,000 children and 23,000 adults waiting for an assessment as of March 2025, and we are talking about waits of years, not a few weeks. Children are becoming adults and going to the back of the queue again. You spoke of a needs-based approach, and you were twice asked by the convener for a timeframe for when the waiting lists will come down. I will give you a third opportunity to answer the question directly. What is the timeframe that we are looking at to reduce the waiting lists?

Following on from Elena Whitham’s questions, I note that it has been reported that NHS Grampian does not have the ability to separate out neurodevelopmental cases from its CAMHS data and, as a result, it could not provide the current length of its waiting list, even if it wanted to. I have also been told by colleagues that NHS Lanarkshire’s data, which was published in The Herald, is actually incorrect and that, when you call the board, you find that the waiting time is actually two years more than the two that had been stated. What is the Scottish Government doing to ensure that such basic data is being collected and published in a transparent way?

Forgive me, minister, but my specific question was about NHS boards, which should have this data.