Dutch officials are set to prosecute a nursing home doctor for euthanising an elderly woman with dementia, the first time a doctor has been charged since the Netherlands legalised euthanasia in 2002.

Dutch prosecutors claimed in a statement the doctor "had not acted carefully" and "overstepped a line" when she performed euthanasia. Officials first began probing the case in September, when they allegedly found the doctor had drugged the patient's coffee and then had family members hold her down while delivering the fatal injection.

The doctor said she was fulfilling the patient's earlier euthanasia request and that since the patient was not competent, nothing the woman said during her euthanasia procedure was relevant.

But Dutch prosecutors argued that the patient's written euthanasia request was "unclear and contradictory."

"In her living will, the woman wrote that she wanted to be euthanised 'whenever I think the time is right.' But after being asked several times in the nursing home whether she wanted to die, she said, 'Not just now, it's not so bad yet,'" according to an earlier report by one of the Netherlands' euthanasia review committees.

"Even if the patient had said at that moment: 'I don't want to die,' the physician would have continued," the committee claimed, citing the doctor's own testimony.