Premature Death Forced by British NHS

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, leading doctors are warning that patients with terminal illnesses are being forced to die prematurely under a National Health Service scheme to help end their lives.

Experts contend that patients are wrongly assessed as close to death with the consequence being, per NHS guidance, that fluids and drugs be withdrawn and replaced with continuous sedation until death occurs.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong. As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Calling it a "death pathway," Dr. Hargreaves expresses concern that patients put on the pathway become tied to a "self-fulfilling prophecy." They end up being terminally sedated which erases the ability to see if they are improving.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

A spokesman for the Department of Health issued a statement that, unfortunately, didn't address the death pathway concern.