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Hello, I'm Susan Hume and this is the Yesterday in Parliament podcast.

On Friday, the 23rd of January, the House of Lords returned once again to the detail of the assisted dying bill.

The bill would allow adults in England and Wales to request help to die if they're considered to have less than six months to live.

The NHS is always under pressure,

so the non-party peer Lord Bert feared accessing an assisted death in the health service

could be a long and tricky process.

He had a suggestion of how to make that journey easier.

An assisted dying help service that would provide a personal navigator to take the dying person

and their loved ones through the whole complex process, providing introductions, keeping

to timelines, piloting the individual through their final challenging

and traumatic journey.

But a Conservative Lord Harper thought people should be helped to navigate their way to other

options too.

If Palo Tuka isn't available to you in the normal course of events, this person can also

help you seek that rather than only being able

to help you seek assisted suicide. An independent peer Lady Fox thought a navigator to help

people through the thicket of services sounded great, but again, not just for assisted deaths.

Those people on trolleys, those people waiting for operations, those people trying to find

their way into the care system. Can we all have one? And if we don't afford every patient

in the country a personal navigator, isn't that an unequal access to services?

The non-party peer Lord Stevens,

...