By Radha Basu, Senior Correspondent

EUTHANASIA is the wrong conversation to have in a nation concerned with dying with dignity.

The focus instead should be on care - how to help the terminally ill live with less pain, says Dr Rosalie Shaw, a palliative care specialist who has helped hundreds here live out their last days over the past 16 years.

'Euthanasia is not about allowing the terminally ill to die with dignity and without distress,' asserts the Australian, who moved to Singapore from Perth in 1992 to help set up hospice care here. 'That is what palliative care does. Instead, it is an act with the intention to kill.'

The doc, the ambulance driver

DR ROSALIE SHAW has spent a lifetime defying stereotypes. She became a doctor at 39, attending Monash University with classmates 15 years her junior.

As a home-hospice doctor in Singapore, the tall, blonde Australian spent years driving around Housing Board heartlands in an ambulance donated to her by a Buddhist charity.

After 16 years here, the farmer's daughter is returning to rural Victoria. But don't ask about retirement - or her age - just yet.

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