Assisted dying: A practical exploration

Professor Nancy Preston is the Co-Director of the International Observatory on End of Life Care at Lancaster University. She completed her degree in Nursing at King’s College, London. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. Her research focuses on palliative care and how best to integrate palliative care into general healthcare systems. She has a strong interest in how people make decisions about their future care including advance care planning and experiences around assisted dying.

Professor Preston has been involved in four European projects including two projects on advance care planning for people with advanced dementia and a second on the use of palliative sedation. Her research about assisted dying has been conducted in the US, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK. Her main focus is on the experience of healthcare professionals and the families who support people who chose to have an assisted death, rather than the ethics of the decision. 

Gillian Leng has had a long career in academia and public service, supporting quality improvement through the use of evidence-based guidelines and policy. As a junior doctor, she was struck by variations in clinical practice and this developed into a passion for using evidence to improve care.  Her career has spanned research, evidence synthesis, management, healthcare, and the life sciences, with a more recent interest in choice at the end of life. 

She was an editor of the Cochrane Collaboration, is a trustee and former chair of the Guidelines International Network and is a visiting professor at King’s College London and an affiliate professor at the National University of Singapore. She spent over 20 years in senior roles at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, becoming only its second Chief Executive. She published a new 5-year strategy for the organisation aiming to put NICE at the forefront of evaluating new medicines, devices and diagnostics, and delivering dynamic, living guidelines. 

Dr Sandy Buchman is a palliative care physician and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Division of Palliative Care at the University of Toronto and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the Freeman Family Chair in Palliative Care and Medical Director of The Freeman Centre for the Advancement of Palliative Care at North York General Hospital in Toronto. From 2019-2020, he served as President of the Canadian Medical Association and is also a past president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Ontario College of Family Physicians. From 2005-2019, he provided home-based palliative and end-of-life care with the Sinai Health System’s Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care and with the Palliative Care and Education for the Homeless (PEACH) Program of Inner City Health Associates in Toronto.

Sandy is a founder and medical lead of a new residential hospice currently being built in the Toronto area, as well as a founder of MAIDHouse, an independent facility for the provision of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Toronto. He is the 2020 recipient of the W. Victor Johnston Award by the College of Family Physicians of Canada. This award recognizes a renowned Canadian or international family medicine leader for continuous and enduring contributions to the specialty of family medicine in Canada or abroad.

Raanan Gillon is a hybrid of retired NHS GP and Philosopher/ Medical Ethicist. He is Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics at Imperial College London where he still does a little teaching, mostly tutoring medical students and on the annual Imperial College one-week intensive course in medical ethics which he started in 1983. He is past Chairman and now Honorary President of the Institute of Medical Ethics. He was Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics for 20 years and a part-time NHS GP for 28 years.

He has published extensively on medical ethics and his elderly book 'Philosophical Medical Ethics' is in its 13th print. In 1999 he was a recipient of the American Hastings Center Beecher award for contributions to ethics and the life sciences. He is an enthusiastic proponent of 'the four principles approach' for both medical ethics and for ethics in general. His career-long association with the BMA, of which he was President for 2019-20, included long service on its Medical Ethics Committee, its International Committee and as one of its representatives at the World Medical Association and at the Standing Committee of European Doctors.