NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.
Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.
It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.
It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.
There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.
I have no doubt that the numbers are true, though the process is less gruesome than described. The British people are a trusting group of both their government and of their physicians. The physician mystique has been kept alive there. In 2000, my beloved Aunt, a British subject and resident of Harrow outside London, died as a direct result of a failure of NHS to schedule her for a stent procedure which would have prevented bile from refluxing and destroying her liver. I contacted physicians in the US with her medical records, and they indicated that she likely had 18-24 months, if treated in the US. Our mistake was trusting the system she has paid into dearly, and in which she believed. Unfortunately, the NHS strategy neglected her. She spent time deteriorating while awaiting the procedure, and then she was eventually picked up by ambulance following 16 hours on the floor of her kitchen, while I tried to call 999 (the British equivalent of 911) from my home in the US. She spent a couple of days in a filthy hospital and was ultimately released to a hospice (which was private, and to which we donated a sizeable portion of her estate.) A Harrow, Middlesex NHS foreign physician, selected for her, killed my aunt, along with a slow to act rationed NHS system which decided that the needs of younger people supeceded her own.
ReplyDeleteI am a US RN with 30 years experience who has also worked as a college instructor. I wish she had been well enough to come here.
I wish she had been well enough to come here.
ReplyDeleteSuch a shame. I believe your post is as devastating, if not more so, than the posted piece.