Analysis depends on information. Without good data, it’s difficult to evaluate policy, including proposals to reform that policy. So it matters that New Zealand’s reports on euthanasia and assisted suicide are somewhat lightweight.

The recent Ministry of Health review of the End of Life Choice Act 2019 continues this pattern. It said that:

On average, for those found eligible [for assisted dying] following assessment:

• the time between a person’s initial formal application and confirmation of their eligibility was 21 days;
• the time taken between initial formal application and the assisted death was 42 days.

But an “average” can be one of several different measures. So we asked the Ministry for more information—specifically, the mean, median, mode and range for those measurements. Here’s the information they gave us.

With this further information, we can see that the mean (which is what the Ministry meant by the “average”) is being skewed by the outlying data—that is, by the large upper values of 283 days and 357 days respectively. This is why the median is often used as a better indicator of the mid-point of a range of data. In this case, the median is quite a bit smaller than the mean. It suggests that people are moving from application to death more quickly than you’d think from the figures in the Ministry’s report. That impression is reinforced by the mode, the most frequently occurring data point, which is lower again.

The figures raise some other interesting points. At least one patient moved from application to death in just two days. Unlike other jurisdictions, New Zealand doesn’t have a ‘cooling off’ period—an opportunity for patients to reflect on their decision—which makes it possible to go through the process rapidly.

At least one other patient was confirmed to be eligible approximately nine months after applying for euthanasia, a procedure that is only available to patients who are expected to die within six months. Likewise, one patient (possibly the same one) had an assisted death nearly a year after their initial application. We can’t go any further than this without knowing anything about these individual cases and the data don’t necessarily indicate a problem—perhaps the latter patient applied, was told they weren’t eligible, but stayed in the system until their condition worsened enough that their prognosis dropped to six months. But these figures help to paint a fuller picture of how the law is working in practice, a picture that is generally lacking from official reports.

We noted this in our submission to the Ministry’s review, pointing out that reports from the Registrar are only required to contain a very minimal set of information: the total number of deaths, how many deaths occurred under each method, the number of complaints received, and “any other matter” the Registrar thinks it appropriate to include.

We went on to say that the Registrar’s reports do not compare well with the comprehensive reports produced in jurisdictions like Oregon. For example, Oregon’s reports contain information on the number of patients who outlived their six month prognosis, the reasons that patients sought assisted suicide and the relatively frequency of those reasons, details of complications experienced by patients, whether patients regained consciousness after taking the lethal medication, the duration of the doctor-patient relationship, and the time taken to die.

By contrast, the Registrar’s reports not only lack this information; they contain generic and unverifiable statements about key information, like “there have been no major complications related to the administration of the medication, and all deaths have occurred within expected timeframes.” What counts as a “major” complication, and what time frames are “expected”?

With matters of life and death literally at stake, it’s difficult to understand why the Registrar and the Ministry don’t proactively and transparently report a full range of relevant statistics. It shouldn’t be necessary to have to resort to the Official Information Act to get important data, even assuming it’s possible to quantify subjective terms like “major” and “expected”.

Other countries demonstrate a much greater commitment to reporting their assisted dying data. It’s time we did the same.