Assisted deaths in Switzerland for UK residents: diagnoses and their implications for palliative medicine and assisted dying legislation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: UK campaigners for a law permitting assisted dying (AD) restricted to those with a maximum life expectancy of 6 months claim that this would largely remove the need for UK residents to seek AD in Switzerland. We wanted to discover whether this prediction was correct. METHODS: We analysed the diagnoses of UK residents who had such deaths including, for the first time, data from all three of the main Swiss providers of AD to non-residents, comparing them with figures from Oregon, which has a 6-month restriction. RESULTS: Only 22.7% of UK residents had cancer (Oregon 72.5%) while nearly half (49.6% and over half including dementias) had neurological conditions (Oregon 11.2%) and many with prognoses of much more than 6 months. CONCLUSION: Overall, less than half would meet a 6-month prognosis criterion. This has significant implications for patients, palliative care clinicians and legislators.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".