I think that my Conservative colleagues are forgetting a few things. We are talking about people whose death is foreseeable, sometimes within a few days. We are talking about the end-of-life phase. When we say that the patient is the norm, it means what is learned from the patient's condition.
General practitioners who provide medical assistance in dying are perfectly capable of reading the entire file of a terminally-ill patient who arrives at emergency. They can tell whether the patient has a few hours or a few days, at most, to live.
Why then must a specialist be brought in when the cancer is metastatic? A specialist in what, precisely? Surely not orthopaedics? When the kidneys are completely dysfunctional, do you need to call in a kidney specialist?
The overall status of patients is what determines whether they are at the end-of-life phase and whether they are suffering. If they ask for medical assistance to die, it's not just because they want to put an end to the suffering, but also because there are other criteria that must be met before acting.
That's why I don't understand how a doctor who is a specialist in one particular part of a person's physiology can add anything other than further delays for those who have been irreversibly dying for a long time and who are now at the end of their tether. Those who want to die at the end of this process can do so, provided that they do not request it.
For those who do, you have to go back to the meaning of the expression “the patient is the norm”. It doesn't require a specialist in every organ of the body to understand when someone is terminally ill.