It’s not every day a Polish bishop asks an English bishop to write to Matt Hancock to plead for the life of a Polish citizen living in England, but that’s what’s happened this week. Last year, Mr RS, as he’s known, had a heart attack, went to hospital in Plymouth and was given hydration and nutrition through tubes into his body. The hospital withdrew this support after a court ruling earlier this month. RS’s wife and children, living here, wanted the hydration and feeding stopped; his Polish mother and sisters wanted it maintained.
The Court of Appeal has sided with his wife and children, while the European Court of Human Rights has refused applications by his Polish family to intervene.
Do we classify food and water as medical treatment because it’s delivered through a tube? Or as basic care?
Right now, the man is dying of thirst — there is no other way of putting it. The withdrawal of artificial hydration has been allowed by English courts ever since the grim case of Tony Bland, a boy left in a vegetative state after the Hillsborough disaster who died after a court ruled he should have the tubes removed that allowed him to be given sustenance.
But what’s new in this case is the intervention of the Polish bishops. The case has caused some disquiet in Poland and the president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki, wrote to Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols asking for his intervention. And so Bishop John Sherrington and Bishop Mark O’Toole wrote to the Health Secretary on behalf of Cardinal Nichols to suggest that giving a patient hydration and nutrition wasn’t medical treatment but basic care. Their letter expressed their opposition: ‘to this definition of medical treatment, and to convey the offer of the Polish authorities to assist in the transfer of Mr RS to Poland for his future care’.
Well, that would be a solution, surely? If poor RS, who never seems to have said that he wouldn’t want to be fed and watered if he couldn’t communicate, were returned to Poland, then the problem would be sorted. A hospital there could give him basic food and hydration while he lived, and the hospital in Plymouth would be relieved of this painful case. But according to Archbishop Gadecki: ‘The authorities of our country assured that they would cover the costs of treatment and transport. The British court does not agree to transport the patient as the journey may be life-threatening.’
Right. So a British court will not allow the transport of a Polish citizen to Poland for the sole purpose of keeping him alive because the journey may be life-threatening? Even though the only possible outcome of keeping him in hospital in Plymouth is him dying of thirst and hunger because the court has allowed his feeding tubes to be withdrawn? Sorry… I don’t get that. The journey from Plymouth to Poland may indeed be dangerous for a very ill patient, but not more dangerous, I’d say, than his current situation.
This case is particularly unpleasant because it involves a life and death difference of opinion between a man’s wife and child and his mother and sisters. It should be said that his family in the UK oppose the idea of returning him to Poland. The wife says she knows what RS would have wanted, but he never seems to have said he would be willing to forgo hydration. And if you strip out the religious aspect and the identity aspect, the case is exactly the same as that of Tony Bland. Do we classify food and water as medical treatment because it’s delivered through a tube? Or as basic care? I’d say the latter. In fact, I can’t think of a more disagreeable way of dying than to be deprived of hydration. Just because a patient cannot communicate, it doesn’t mean he can’t experience discomfort deep inside his brain.
This doesn’t mean that RS would have to be kept alive indefinitely. If he is only given basic care rather than medical treatment, it’s very possible that he may die of an infection if he’s not given antibiotics. The difference is between starving a patient to death and allowing him to die. It’s a fundamental difference. Rather than subcontracting this moral issue to the courts — whose idea of a patient’s best interests wouldn’t be mine — perhaps it’s time for parliament to adjudicate on this. Meanwhile, let poor RS’s family take him back to Poland. If the stress of the journey kills him, it can’t be any more disagreeable than dying of thirst here.
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