posted June 20, 2012 12:15 PM            

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

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.

Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.

He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.

Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated.
He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’.
In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift.

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Professor Pullicino said he had returned to work after a weekend to find the patient unresponsive and his family upset because they had not agreed to place him on the LCP.
‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,’ he said.
‘His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family,’ he said.

Professor Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, was speaking to the Royal Society of Medicine in London.

Distressing: The professor has claimed an approved technique of looking after the terminally ill is not being used in all hospitals
He said: ‘The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway.

‘Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.

‘Patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition.

‘Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically.

This determination in the LCP leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal views of the physician or other medical team members of perceived quality of life or low likelihood of a good outcome are probably central in putting a patient on the LCP.’

He added: ‘If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths.’

The LCP was developed in the North West during the 1990s and recommended to hospitals by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in 2004.

Medical criticisms of the Liverpool Care Pathway were voiced nearly three years ago.

Experts including Peter Millard, emeritus professor of geriatrics at the University of London, and Dr Peter Hargreaves, palliative care consultant at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, Surrey, warned of ‘backdoor euthanasia’ and the risk that economic factors were being brought into the treatment of vulnerable patients.

In the example of the 71-year-old, Professor Pullicino revealed he had given the patient another 14 months of life by demanding the man be removed from the LCP.

Professor Pullicino said the patient was an Italian who spoke poor English, but was living with a ‘supportive wife and daughter’. He had a history of cerebral haemorrhage and subsequent seizures.

Professor Pullicino said: ‘I found him deeply unresponsive on a Monday morning and was told he had been put on the LCP. He was on morphine via a syringe driver.’ He added: ‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance.’

The patient’s extra 14 months of life came at considerable cost to the NHS and the taxpayer, Professor Pullicino indicated.
He said he needed extensive support with wheelchair, ramps and nursing.

After 14 months the patient was admitted to a different hospital with pneumonia and put on the LCP. The man died five hours later.

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The Liverpool Care Pathway is not euthanasia and we do not recognise these figures. The pathway is recommended by NICE and has overwhelming support from clinicians – at home and abroad – including the Royal College of Physicians.

‘A patient’s condition is monitored at least every four hours and, if a patient improves, they are taken off the Liverpool Care Pathway and given whatever treatments best suit their new needs.’

**Note** Right..Right..if a patient improves with no medication, no food, no water, then they can be taken off the death path. Wow!**

posted June 20, 2012 12:35 PM            

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posted June 20, 2012 12:49 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:

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It's true AG. You better pay attention. You may need grace, sometime, too

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posted June 20, 2012 01:43 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:
The implication that this is where American healthcare is headed is not true, Ami, and further it's offensively fear mongering to have posted. Not only so, but facets of Obama's healthcare reform are independently being adopted anyway by certain healthcare companies. There's nothing inherently wrong with healthcare reform, and ideas about rationing are at the very least premature.

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It IS heading here, AG. Where else is it headed? Wake up and smell the organic french roast

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posted June 20, 2012 01:52 PM            

We don't have government-run healthcare even under this healthcare reform. That's the first and biggest of differences between our system under the new law versus England's system. Second, Palin was found roundly wrong repeatedly by experts across the board regarding her ideas of rationing and death panels. In my own rebuke of her flawed thinking, I pointed out that insurance companies were acting as those panels in the United States prior to reform. You think an insurance company wants to take on costly measures to keep people alive? No, they don't. They're a business, and businesses exist to make profits. Third, one of the things that's been on American minds for years is a Patient's Bill of Rights. Why? In order to deal with medical abuses. We don't live in a country that's going to be OK with letting the medical community abuse patients regardless of who runs or regulates healthcare. Understand?

You guys don't have crystal balls. We're not living in Conservative fantasyland here.

posted June 20, 2012 02:32 PM            

i agree, this scaremongering is not only pathetic but is basically a method of mind control used to put your critical thinking to rest, not your life.

posted June 20, 2012 03:20 PM            

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posted June 20, 2012 05:09 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by AcousticGod:
Ami, Kat doesn't want things to stay the same. Things can't stay the same anyway. Progress and change are inevitable. There's nothing you or Jwhop can do to stop it. Something like healthcare reform wouldn't exist if things were perfect as they are. Things that aren't broken don't get fixed.

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posted June 20, 2012 09:28 PM            

who is it who is always saying that THE LEFT thinks it knows best what is good for all of us and doesn't allow us to do for ourselves????? what piffle, ami, sorry, but i don't need people who don't look any further than jwhop's tabloids and egomaniacal bloggers and rush limbaugh's paid circus act for information to protect me from myself.

you like to talk about how educated you are, but you are far from alone in that and you don't USE your education for diddly squat...supposedly you had to do more than reiterate what your teachers told you when in grad school if not in college? though i know many supposedly great schools where the teachers ask nothing more than regurgitation..

but that is what you do here, regurgitate other people's overdigested opinions.

the world has changed since the founding fathers did their thing. jefferson KNEW IT WOULD CHANGE and warned against the very things YOU think are so wonderful, religion getting into government affairs and corporations consolidating wealth to the point where they are dangerous to our freedoms.

and the world is changing now too. america has reached that point of corruption jefferson also predicted, with population centred in urban areas and big business sewing up the market and buying the government through lobbyists and bent congresspeople.

the america you grew up in and so cherish was not a place of "free market" and "small government" OR small taxes. it WAS much less populated and much less complicated when everyone unwhite was relegated to the bottom rungs but was it better? not necessarily.

posted June 20, 2012 09:36 PM            

there are tons of horror stories about our own healthcare system, why would you go to england and its sensationalist press to scare yourself?

trauma/drama to the end, eh wot?

actually it will probably be my grandchildren who save YOU, ami, from the rampant religious right and corporatism running your life; THEY are of the next "hero" generation (like the "greatest generation just now leaving the planet). not you and jwhop, sorry.

posted June 21, 2012 01:36 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by katatonic:
i paid my first ever visit to the emergency room a few weeks ago. the doctor i saw warned me that "any tests at all would put the bill in the thousands" - spent 10 minutes talking AT me and diagnosed without any examination, prescribed generic anti-inflammatories and pain killer and i received a bill for nearly $2000.

there are tons of horror stories about our own healthcare system, why would you go to england and its sensationalist press to scare yourself?

trauma/drama to the end, eh wot?

actually it will probably be my grandchildren who save YOU, ami, from the rampant religious right and corporatism running your life; THEY are of the next "hero" generation (like the "greatest generation just now leaving the planet). not you and jwhop, sorry.

remember hitler's "christian movement"? otherwise called nazism. people so desperate for a leader that they will follow anyone who says what they want to hear...

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With all DUE respect, Kat, this makes no sense

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posted June 21, 2012 02:10 PM            

there is a qualititative difference between someone who runs for president only to find that his options are severely limited by structures long in place - and one who knows he is only meant to sign what congress(bought and paid for by lobbyists) decides.

most presidents since kennedy have had little elbow room within the system. some have been better than others at navigating the maze.

meanwhile

posted June 21, 2012 02:22 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by katatonic:
no of course not. to you. with all due respect, you appear unable to see anything that doesn't fit your predetermined notions. one of which is that a jew would never support fascism. except that is what romney is being put in place for...as OPENLY explained by norquist and others.

there is a qualititative difference between someone who runs for president only to find that his options are severely limited by structures long in place - and one who knows he is only meant to sign what congress(bought and paid for by lobbyists) decides.

most presidents since kennedy have had little elbow room within the system. some have been better than others at navigating the maze.

meanwhile

there is no need to moan and groan about the british healthcare system, since we are not in britain and no one has suggested copying it. even if the daily mail's alarmist/sensationalist hectoring were true, it is as apples and oranges.

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Your comments are as confusing as an analogy test.

Dog is to woods as woods are to trees

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