Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Many of the amendments I'm moving forward have come out of our study and witness testimony, and also input that we received from members who participated in the process through last week while we were listening to various testimony.
Effectively, this amendment would say that a nurse practitioner is not someone who would be eligible to qualify for the exemption for medical assistance in dying. There are also probably about another half a dozen amendments that would change that terminology throughout the bill, which means it would have to be a medical practitioner who does the assessment, makes the decision, and does the administration.
The reason for this is that we don't even allow nurse practitioners today to issue prescriptions with narcotics. We don't allow them the ability to ask for an X-ray. When we're looking at something as sobering as physician-assisted suicide—the assessment, the prescription, and the administration of that—I think it needs to be somebody at the medical practitioner level. For that reason, I've made this amendment that would exclude nurse practitioners from that category.