UK: The caring killers: Death by night shift

For years, nurses illegally administered morphine and other powerful drugs. Hospital patients died. Now the story can be told.
Nina Lakhani reports
Sunday, 6 June 2010

A showcase hospital that won the Government's highest three-star rating allowed nurses to prescribe illegally and administer powerful drugs which police believe killed three patients and injured many more.

A damning report into "systemic failures" at the Airedale NHS Trust reveals that night nurses at the hospital in Keighley, West Yorkshire, openly gave patients drugs such as morphine intravenously for many years, despite the practice being illegal and against hospital rules.

Nobody has ever faced trial or been struck off as a result. One nurse at the heart of the inquiry, Sister Anne Grigg-Booth, was charged with three murders, one attempted murder and more than a dozen lesser, related charges but died of an overdose in 2005 before the case came to trial. Her death meant the allegations against her were never tested. No motive has ever been suggested for her actions. the rest

Legalizing Euthanasia in Belgium Unleashes Nurses to Do Doctor-Ordered Non Voluntary Killing
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Wesley J. Smith

Belgium has followed the Netherlands in jumping off a vertical moral cliff by embracing legalized euthanasia. The awful consequences that I predicted are now coming to pass; a steady increase in the number of cases, inadequate reporting, and a large percentage of non voluntary euthanasia deaths. Thus, I am anything but surprised by the study I analyze below, which echoes an earlier one reported here at SHS, that nearly as many Belgian euthanasia killings are non voluntary as of those that are voluntary (the concept of “voluntary” in this context being highly problematic, but let’s not deal with that here).

Why might that be? Euthanasia consciousness rests on two intellectual pillers–that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, and radical individualism in which we all own our bodies and have the absolute right to do what we wish with it, including make it dead. But interestingly, the latter idea–often reduced to that most effective of all soundbites, “choice”–turns out to be far less robust than the acceptance of active killing as a proper method of ending suffering. In other words, once a society accepts killing as the answer to suffering, the request element becomes increasingly less important as doctors assume they are doing what is best for the patient by extinguishing their lives. the rest