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Her daughter's account of the last painful days of the actress Diana Rigg

prompted another wave of commentary this week about whether the UK should change the law regarding assisted dying.

When we first started the briefing room over seven years ago,

it was a subject where the lack of evidence meant that we regarded this as a largely ethical or theoretical issue, not for us.

It was one for the moral maze.

But things have changed. Specifically, a number of countries

have now had assisted dying and euthanasia policies in place for some time, providing some

of the evidence that was previously missing. So what does that evidence tell us and how might

we respond to it? Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.

Let's start with some definitions and with establishing what is and isn't legal in the UK.

Imogen Gould is Professor of Medical Law at the University of Oxford.

Imogen Gould, let's start with some definitions,

because a lot of people use some of these terms interchangeably.

I think I might even have done so myself.

So could you put me straight?

So I think we might talk generally about something called assisted dying.

And I think the way to think about that is it's a blanket term

for a range of ways in which people might choose to end

their lives. Within that, we would talk about assisted suicide. And what we mean by that is

where someone is assisted to end their lives themselves. So that might mean giving them some

medications that they take themselves that will end their life, or it might mean things like

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