With investment in palliative care, we can improve on our current end-of-life options – ‘Switzerland, suicide or suffering’

• Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
• Report: Gordon Brown: improve end-of-life care rather than allow assisted dying

Jennifer, the baby daughter my wife Sarah brought into the world a few days after Christmas 2001, died after only 11 days. By day four, when the extent of her brain haemorrhage had been diagnosed, we were fully aware that all hope was gone and that she had no chance of survival. We could only sit with her, hold her tiny hand and be there for her as life ebbed away. She died in our arms. But those days we spent with her remain among the most precious days of my and Sarah’s lives. The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care.

We were reassured that she was not in pain. At the heart of the debate on assisted dying is our desire to prevent suffering. Almost every family is able to talk from firsthand experience of heartbreaking moments when they want to do their best by their parents, grandparents or mortally ill children – and then feel they have failed. Our sympathies naturally flow to those fatally sick patients we know who themselves fear the suffering that lies ahead of them and losing control over their final months, days, or even hours.

Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010