Act now to protect quality of life

fluids - however serious your condition may become.

You are also advised to carry a card, similar to an organ donor card; repeating this unequivocal message. The anti-euthanasia organisation, Right to Life, ` now promotes a "Human Rights Care Card" suitable for wallet or handbag. The card, which has the support of more than 40 cross-bench MPs, quotes he Article on' Human Rights and informs medical staff that you have instructed next of kin to take legal action, if necessary, to protect your life until natural death.

Since doctors and hospital administrators have shown themselves responsive to legal constraint; (because failure to do so aright cost them money) affirmations of this kind should hopefully concentrate minds more effectively than ethical or emotional arguments at times of clinical indecision.

You can contact Right to Life at: PO Box 26264, London W3 9WF Tel: 020 8992 7657, Website: http://www.righttolife.org.uk/

SPUC have also opened a national helpline for relatives of terminally ill patients threatened with the withdrawal of sustenance. Tel: 07952 245 421.

WHEN a disabled patient is obliged to go to the High Court and plead for his basic right to life it is not just an indictment of the NHS, it is a scandalous reflection on society itself, writes ADAM GRACE.

The scandal is compounded by the fact that Leslie Burke's case is not an isolated one. As The Universe revealed recently, patients suffering from strokes and other forms of brain damage are already being legally starved to death in hospitals throughout the country. Empowered by General Medical Council guidelines, doctors can now withdraw food and fluids from the terminally ill with impunity They justify their life-or-death decisions as being in patients' best interest and, while no-one doubts their good faith, their clinical assessments arc bound
to depend on subjective and entirely arbitrary "quality of life" criteria.

When patients are unable to speak for themselves and relatives appeal on their loved ones' behalf to keep them alive doctors are under no obligation to comply. Cases have been reported recently in Derby and elsewhere when families of stroke victims have secretly fed their stricken relatives, Such traumatic scenes clearly have no part in a supposedly civilised society

Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, now binding in Britain, states that everyone has the right to life, while Article 3 of the Convention forbids inhuman and degrading treatment. Medical staff who condemn patients to death frorn
hunger and/or dehydration stand accused of failing them on both counts. Cynics may well claim that the present policy has more to do with the government's crude approach to freeing-up beds and meeting targets than with patients' best interests. In other words, saving money rather than lives.

Measures arc urgently needed to bring this alarming GMC policy in Iine with European law but until necessary safeguards are implemented, hopefully as a result of Mr Burke's enforced litigation, vulnerable patients need to protect themselves as best they can. If you prefer to die when God decides, rather than on the whim of a doctor whose "quality of life" perception may differ from your own, the time to act is now, while, you are still able to make your wishes known. Two methods are suggested. Draw up a true "Living Will", a legally binding document instructing, doctors and nurses not to terminate your life prematurely by withdrawing food and