The lobby group Dying With Dignity says it is thrilled the Tasmanian Government plans to look at legalising voluntary euthanasia.

Greens leader Nick McKim introduced a voluntary euthanasia private members bill last year but it failed to win support.

The right-to-die campaigner Phillip Nitschke says the deaths of a Perth couple is a wakeup call for the State Government to change WA's euthanasia laws.
The bodies of 66-year-old John Carl Stewart and his 61-year-old terminally ill wife Jennifer Anne Stewart were found on Monday by their daughter in their Sawyers Valley home.

Germany's Supreme Court has issued a landmark ruling that an assisted suicide cannot be punished if it is carried out based on a patient's prior request.

The court on Thursday acquitted a lawyer who had counseled his client in 2007 to cut the tube feeding her mother, who had been in a non-responsive coma for five years. A lower court had handed the lawyer a nine-month suspended sentence.

The high court said the then 71-year-old woman had expressed the wish not to be kept alive under such circumstances in 2002 before falling into the coma.

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger welcomed the ruling as a major step toward respecting an individual's free will.

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit aimed at making it legal for doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives will not appeal a judge's decision to dismiss the case.

Two physicians from Fairfield County, Connecticut, Gary Black and Ronald Levine filed the lawsuit in 2009 asking the court to declare that a state law against assisting suicide would not apply to doctors who prescribed lethal medication to mentally competent, terminally ill patients who asked for it. Doing so would not be suicide, their lawsuit argued, but "aid in dying."

The Board of Wishaw General Hospital in Lanarkshire, UK has been ordered to apologise to a family for a hospital’s failure to show “dignity” to a dying female dementia patient.

The 66-year-old grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was found by her family lying exposed with her head trapped in bed bars. Staff at Wishaw General Hospital, run by NHS Lanarkshire, had also failed to pull the curtain around her bed when she was being washed.

The chronically sick and terminally ill will lose critical psychological support under a new national accreditation scheme, the Australian Psychology Society has warned. The society says the failure to recognise health psychology will stall the training of new practitioners and open the door to "quacks and shonks" to offer inferior services to our most vulnerable.