In a stunning display of medical common sense that will surely ruffle some feathers in the assisted dying lobby, transplant surgeon and former Labour minister Zubir Ahmed has waded into the debate with a simple suggestion: perhaps we should fix how we care for the dying before we start helping them die.

Ahmed, who has spent his professional life holding people's lives in his hands - literally, as a vascular and transplant surgeon - has seen the anxiety that surrounds the prospect of dying and the desperate wish of patients and families to avoid unnecessary suffering. Naturally, we all want kindness and respect for the dying, but Ahmed insists that true compassion demands we ask a more fundamental question: What kind of society are we building if, before we've fixed the systems designed to care for people, we introduce a system designed to help them die?

It's a fair point. In England and Wales, access to proper palliative care is, shall we say, patchy. Too many people facing the end of life don't get the support they need, and Ahmed argues that a person's wish to die can be shaped by whether they have access to that care. In other words, before we start offering assisted dying as a solution, maybe we should make sure the default option doesn't involve suffering.

Ahmed, who served as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Health and Social Care from 6 September 2025 to 12 May 2026, knows a thing or two about the NHS's inner workings. His message is clear: let's not put the cart before the horse, especially when the cart is a one-way ticket to the great beyond.

So, as the debate rages on, Ahmed's advice is simple: fix the care first, then have the conversation. Because, as he so astutely notes, the kind of society we're building depends on the order in which we do things. And ideally, we'd want to build a society where people don't feel forced to choose death because the alternative is unbearable.