A literature search was performed using a range of online databases, of which two relevant papers were chosen, reviewed and compared. The subject matter concerned attitudes towards euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS), the authors of the papers sent questionnaires out to a number of currently practicing doctors and analysed the results using data analysis methods. The results were then delivered in a series of tables and graphs.

This literature review is based upon people’s attitudes towards Euthanasia, which comes from the Greek meaning ‘good death’ and in English means the killing of one person by another to relieve the suffering of that person and Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS), which is described as; a medical professional aiding a person who is incapable of the act themselves to commit suicide, (NHS, 2010). For this literature review, a literature search was performed using the Cochrane library, Science Direct, EBSCOhost and Sage using the key words:

• Assisted suicide
• Euthanasia
• Opinions
• Attitude
• United Kingdom
• Public
• Right to Die
• Assisted Dying

Most of these words (with the exception of Assisted Suicide and Assisted Dying) were used in each of the search engines individually and also used to form sentences, however, the only electronic databases that gave this search the information it required was Sage. This provided a substantial amount of journals, a lot of the others used were subscription based or a fee was required, but from the free to use information two of the most relevant to the subject I wished to perform the review on were chosen. The two papers were chosen from surveys and studies performed in the United Kingdom, because it was decided to research what the thoughts and feelings of medical professionals were in a place where this practice was presently illegal. Use in the literature search, but this was difficult to come by. The titles of the three journals are: ‘Legalisation of Euthanasia or Physician Assisted Suicide: Survey of Doctors’ Attitudes’, and Opinions of the Legalised of Physician Assisted Suicide. Despite not inputting the word ‘physician’ into the search engine, a lot of the searches came up with types of journals which mention this anyway.

This review will critically evaluate the information in the journals and will be compared with each other, discussing the disadvantages of the surveys and the advantages. The review will also include the various research methods used in the research.

The Literature Review

The first paper reviewed is in English by Clive Seale, PhD, from the Centre for Health Sciences, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, London and is called ‘The legalisation of Euthanasia or Physician-Assisted Suicide: Survey of Doctors’ Attitudes’. The protocol was to determine what doctors’ opinions about the legalisation of medically assisted dying (which includes the terms, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS)) were and this was done in comparison with the opinions of the general public of the UK. The methodology was to send out structured questionnaires with a series of questions using qualitative methods and then analyse the results in a quantitative manner. In 2007, Binley’s database (http://www.binleys.com) was used to send questionnaires to 8857 currently working medical practitioners all over the UK, this was broken down into 2829 (7%) GPs, 443 (43%) neurologists, 836 (21% of these were doctors) specialists in the care of the elderly, 462 (54% of these were also doctors) specialists in palliative medicine and 4287 workers in other hospital based specialities. This is quite a large sample to use and covers a wide range of specialities. It is not clear in what month in 2007 these questionnaires were sent out but follow-up letters were sent to non-respondents between November 2007 and April 2008 to enquire as to why they did not respond, in which 66 doctors in all responded with the most common reason being lack of time to complete the survey. Overall the response rate was 42.1% with specialists in palliative medicine being the most responsive with 67.3% of people returning their questionnaire, along with specialists in the care of the elderly (48.1%) neurologists (42.9%) other hospital specialties (40.1%) and GPs (39.3%). Despite the large sample of people, 42.1% of replies are quite disappointing, although it is a very emotive subject.

The questions consisted of personal questions such as age, gender, grade, ethnic origin, and speciality of the respondent and, on average, the number of deaths attended. They were all asked four questions about their attitude towards euthanasia and assisted suicide, in order to obtain the questionnaire in full the author of the survey invited people to contact him. An email was sent: Appendix (a) and a reply was received the next day: Appendix (b). Previous surveys regarding this subject were