(ANSA) - After careful evaluation of the individual case, the doctor who freely chooses to facilitate suicide will not be punishable from a disciplinary point of view, if the conditions set by the Constitutional Court are met. This was unanimously established, learns ANSA, the Council of the National Federation of Medical Orders (Fnomceo), integrating the Code of Conduct which, in article 17, provides that the doctor, even at the request of the patient, must not implement nor favor acts aimed at causing their death.
The National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (Fnomceo) has issued the application addresses of article 17.
In the guidelines, now an integral part of the Code of Medical Deontology, it is stated that "the free choice of the doctor to facilitate, on the basis of the principle of self-determination of the individual, the purpose of suicide autonomously and freely formed by a person held in life from life-support treatments, affected by an irreversible pathology, source of intolerable physical or psychological suffering, which is fully capable of making free and conscious decisions (Constitutional Court ruling 242/19 and related procedures), must always be assessed case by case and implies, if all the above elements exist, the non-punishment of the doctor from a disciplinary point of view ". The Fnomceo National Council, made up of 106 presidents of the territorial Orders, thus wanted to update the Code after the Constitutional Court ruling 242/2019, which identified a limited area in which the indictment for the aid to suicide does not comply with the Constitution. These are the cases in which the aid concerns a person kept alive by life support treatments (such as, for example, hydration and artificial feeding) and suffering from an irreversible pathology, source of intolerable physical or psychological suffering, but who remains fully capable of making free and conscious decisions. If all these circumstances occur, in addition to some procedural conditions, the facilitation of suicide is therefore not punishable from a criminal point of view.