Assisted dying — why aren’t we prototyping the policy?
Was listening to Newscast while making lunch today as they discussed whether a change to the Assisted Dying bill would amount to strengthening or ‘watering down’ protections against coercion. (Jump to 17:35 for the segment on the Assisted Dying bill)
If I understood correctly, essentially the change being proposed (by the sponsor of the bill herself) is that rather than having a sitting high court judge rule on every case where someone is petitioning to end their life, each application would be decided by a panel that will include someone with legal expertise along with psychologists, social workers, and people with other relevant expertise.
On the face of it, that seems to me like an improvement on the original idea, as a range of professional opinions will usually result in a more considered judgement than any one individual’s opinion. And the question the panel will be considering will have much more than just a legal element at the core of it, so a judge — no matter how experienced — might not be the most suitable person to assess the situation and make the decision.
But regardless of what my hunch is, the only way to really know which approach will provide better safeguards is to test it out.
As a service designer, if I was asked to look into this issue, I’d probably start by creating 5–10 very realistic case studies (either pulled from real life or created by people who work in and around hospice settings, who can imagine what kind of scenarios might lead to applications to end one’s life). I’d pull together a panel like the one being proposed — or maybe two or three versions of the panel — and I’d ask them to act exactly as if they were considering a case.
I’d record their proceedings so we could understand what information they considered and how they made their decision.
I’d then give the same information to a high court judge and ask them to make a ruling, and explain what information they considered and how they made their decision.
We’d repeat this process — with as many scenarios and panels and different deliberation procedures as necessary — until we could come to a clear conclusion about which approach is most effective to ensure safeguards, while also remaining efficient enough to be implemented at scale with the investment we expect to be available.
We wouldn’t need to have a back and forth in the media to debate which approach is more likely to provide the safeguards everyone wants — we would simply know (with a reasonable degree of confidence), because we tested it out.
And as a bonus, we’d probably also learn a lot about what kind of information should be presented to the decision maker(s), and in what form, to enable them to come to the best decision as efficiently as possible. What options should the applicant have to make their case? Should it be a written statement, or a recorded video, or an in-person discussion with the panel? Who should (or shouldn’t) be allowed to help them create those materials? What documentary evidence might be needed to assess the application?
I work with a lot of service designers who work in complex policy areas. We often talk about testing ideas in ways that are ‘safe to fail but designed to learn’. Our Parliamentary process is designed to enable MPs to amend the details of the legislation once it gets to committee stage. But are our Parliamentary committees set up to test out ideas before they enshrine the details in law, or do they just hear testimony and then make their best guesses about what will happen in reality? If they’re not set up to prototype ideas like this, to help them decide which approaches are most likely to achieve the outcomes they’re looking for, why is that?
Should each Parliamentary committee have access to some service designers and user researchers to help them prototype ideas and build their understanding of what works?
