Ilora Gillian Finlay, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, is a Welsh doctor, professor of palliative medicine, and an Independent Crossbench member of the House of Lords.
She is a past president of the Royal Society of Medicine. She is a professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, and is consultant at the Velindre cancer centre in Cardiff. In 2001, she was made a life peer as Baroness Finlay of Llandaff.
In 2003 she proposed a bill to ban smoking in public buildings in Wales, three years before it was eventually implemented.[1]
In 2007, Lady Finlay introduced a private members bill seeking to change the current system of organ donation from 'opt in' to 'opt out'. Parliamentary timing did not allow for this bill to proceed but the principle continues to be debated. Two years later she succeeded in changing government policy on organ donation to allow potential organ donors to be able to specify a family member of close friend to whom they wish to donate their organ(s).
In March 2010, Baroness Finlay sponsored the Sunbeds (Regulation) Bill as it reached the House of Lords for scrutiny. With just weeks before the forthcoming general election, Baroness Finlay, with the Government and Opposition frontbenchs' support, took the MP Julie Morgan's private members' bill through its final stages, to Royal Assent.
Baroness Finlay chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well (www.dyingwell.org.uk). This group of MP's and Peers was established to promote palliative care and oppose legalised euthanasia.
She is a Patron of the charities the Trussell Trust's foodbank network in Wales, and the Motor Neurone Disease Association. She is also patron of Student Volunteering Cardiff[2] She was a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is a Member of its inaugural Council.