New Clause 1 — Excluded decisions
Orders of the Day — Mental Capacity Bill
1:15 pm
Mr Gordon Marsden (PPS (Rt Hon Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State), Department for Culture, Media & Sport; Blackpool South, Labour)
As was made clear at the start of the debate, a key issue is the ability of some advance decisions to be flexible. Does it worry my hon. Friend that, in taking account of what the best interests of a patient might be, doctors and medical authorities might place too much emphasis on what might or might not have been said by that patient five or 10 years earlier? We have all heard the eloquent description given by my hon. Friend Mrs. Curtis-Thomas of the case of her mother, which is a classic illustration of why it is important to preserve flexibility. Does my hon. Friend feel that the wording of his amendment would allow doctors to make their decisions largely on the basis of the physical state of the person before them, rather than on what they might have said five or 10 years earlier?