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Advice on withholding food and water breaks the law, group claims

Zosia Kmietowicz, London

A doctors group is calling for a new law to protect patients who are not dying but who are being denied food and fluids, which they say is common practice and illegal.

An advertisement in this week's BMJ that is funded by the Doctors who Respect Human Life campaign, claims that current General Medical Council's guidance allows doctors to let patients die by withholding artificial feeding and hydration even though they may not be dying.

Richard Gordon QC, from whom the group sought a legal opinion, says that parts of both the GMC's and the BMA's guidance on withholding and withdrawing life prolonging treatment contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.

Dr Michael Howitt Wilson, chairman of the British section of the campaign, said that the law on withholding food and fluids had been "confused" since the case of Tony Bland, who was left in a coma after being crushed in an incident at Hillsborough football stadium in 1989 that killed nearly 100 people. In 1993 the House of Lords ruled that the artificial nutrition being administered to Tony Bland was a form of treatment and could be withheld at doctors' discretion.

"Since the Bland case we have heard all sorts of stories that people with strokes and other conditions have ceased to be fed even though they were not dying," said Dr Howitt Wilson.

The Patients' Protection Bill, a private members bill that is due to be go before the House of Lords on 30 April, would make the practice illegal if it became law, he added.

The GMC said in a statement that many of the issues raised during debates on the bill had been considered when its own guidance was being developed. "We will follow the passage of this bill with considerable interest, but we are concerned that, as drafted, the bill does not add to the existing legal safeguards for patients," the council said.

The BMA commented: "The primary goal of medicine is to benefit the patient. If medical treatment can no longer do this, then ethically the doctor must start to consider whether it should be withdrawn."

(Credit: SPL/SUE FORD ) A patient suffering from brain death is kept alive on a life support machine