Assisting death or letting die? Withdrawing treatment at the patients' request

Withdrawing ventilation from patients who are incapable of consent because they lack mental capacity is an uncomplicated decision at common law. This decision is less clear when the patient's capacity is in doubt, because of the great difficulty in identification of the exact boundary between capacity and incapacity. An additional difficulty arises in cases where a patients capacity is questionable and they refuse treatment. This paper uses the recent case of B v. an NHS Hospital Trust [2002] to explore the dilemmas that face nurses in the acute sector when they are involved in the care of a patient who appears to have made a competent request to have treatment withdrawn, knowing that this will lead directly to death.