NHS claimed to “intentionally” kill 130,000 elderly patients every year
The Daily Mail in the UK reported on the way that the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), an end-of-life care programme is being used in the NHS.
The programme was designed to help improve what was termed as - the "quality of dying" - for terminally ill patients.
Once a doctor – or a nurse – determines that a patient has days or hours left to live, they are allowed to give them a steady dose of morphine – or other painkillers – until they die.
The report quotes a ‘prominent professor’ as describing this programme as a “back-door form of euthanasia” and claiming that it now “kills” around 130,000 patients every year.
The accusation is that many healthcare practitioners aren’t properly assessing patients’ status and simply implementing the programme when they want – and it is felt – that this is being used to remove troublesome patients.
The key critic of this policy, Professor Patrick Pullicino, says he has personally witnessed this programme being used to “deliberately kill patients that were not terminally ill”.
(Doctors reiterated their opposition to assisted dying at the British Medical Association’s conference 27th June 2012)