CNA Staff, Jan 11, 2024 / 12:45 pm
The Irish Medical Council has stripped a prohibition against the “deliberate killing” of patients from the most recent update to its national medical guidelines.
The Medical Council on its website says it “regulates medical doctors in Ireland” by way of “promoting and better ensuring high standards of professional conduct, education, training, and competence among doctors.”
Part of its regulation includes its “Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners,” which it reissues with updates periodically. The council says the guide “sets out the principles of professional practice that all doctors registered with the council are expected to follow.”
In the seventh edition of that document, published in 2009, the council — in the guide’s section on end-of-life care — explicitly directed that doctors may “not participate in the deliberate killing of a patient by active means.”