NHS health professionals fear palliative care after Harold Shipman murders

An MP has claimed that health care professionals in the NHS are cautious about administering palliative care following the Harold Shipman murders. Speaking during the assisted dying bill debate in the House of Commons on Friday (20 June), Sir Edward Leigh urged his fellow MPs to take a “pause” and ask the Health Department on “whether it is possible to have decent palliative care”. “There’s no doubt that in recent years, particularly since Shipman, there has been a fear amongst many health professionals in the NHS about providing that degree of hugely effective modern drugs,” he said. Shipman was an English doctor who murdered about 250 of his patients between the 1970s and 1990s, who died when he injected many of them with lethal doses of diamorphine.