Canada’s assisted dying regime could provide a cover for medical staff with “serially homicidal personalities,” according to a controversial paper critics say provides no evidence patients could be preyed upon by criminal medical murderers. “Canada’s MAID (medical assistance in dying) system is criticized as the most permissive or least safeguarded in the world, raising the question of whether it could protect patients who fit the clinical profile of adult victims of HSK (health-care serial killers) from a killer working as a MAID provider,” Christopher Lyon, a Canadian social scientist who teachers at the University of York in the United Kingdom, wrote in a newly published paper. Insufficient vetting of staff, poor surveillance and oversight, and a failure by authorities to act on concerns raised by suspicious colleagues or witnesses have allowed health-care serial killers to go undetected for considerable periods, Lyon wrote in the journal HEC (HealthCare Ethics Committee) Forum, a partner journal of the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics.
Canada’s MAID regime “has similar features,” Lyon wrote, “with added opportunities for killing” afforded by broad Criminal Code exemptions from homicide and suicide offences “amid broad patient eligibility criteria.” MAID’s oversight and delivery needs a “radical restructuring” to help mitigate the possibility of abuses, he said. Lyon’s 77-year-old father died by MAID in 2021 in a Victoria hosp.