Liverpool Care Pathway – A Sobering Thought

The Liverpool Care Pathway - an 'unlawful' practice

That reasoning appears perfectly valid. This is the act of taking life, however, and if that taking of life is 'unlawful' then that is murder and that is a sobering thought.

That this taking of life is State-sponsored is not merely frightening, it is scandalous.

This State-sponsorship goes further than merely promoting the LCP protocols, however; it extends to the DOH-sponsored Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payments made to Trusts to bribe them into setting in place LCP protocols.

Forking out these payments is still the cheaper option compared with providing access to appropriate and adequate palliative care. Thus, the elderly are more likely to be placed on the LCP Death Pathway. A cash-strapped NHS can ill afford recuperative care for someone already on the downhill slope of terminal old age.

The NHS, which provides care free at the point of delivery, is funded from contributions taken at the point of collection - our wage packets. Where is all this money going? Do we have any say where it is going?

We do know that it isn't all going into provision of care to those who have worked all their lives to fund it!

Apart from lining the pockets of an unwieldy superstructure of managers and bureaucrats, a bleeding sore called Private Finance Initiatives (PFI's) is, apparently, preventing 22 NHS trusts from balancing their books.

According to The Telegraph, 

The price tag for repaying PFI firms will reach £8.6 billion next year alone, with the taxpayer owing a total of £121.4 billion on public projects which are worth only £52.9 billion.
Many PFI deals tie local authorities into expensive catering, cleaning and maintenance contracts, meaning the total bill to the taxpayer is £229 billion. In one case, a school was charged £320 for a plug socket.
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph in January revealed young people starting work this year will pay taxes for the Government’s Private Finance Initiative until they are nearly 70.
Labour’s last health secretary, Andy Burnham, who was in charge of 221 PFI projects, admitted last year: “We made mistakes. I’m not defending every pen-stroke of the PFI contracts we signed.”

Hospitals are facing closure because they cannot pay debts incurred on expensive PFI deals

The Telegraph  continues - 

Where is the money going? 

Private contractors who agreed PFI deals with the Government are set to make billions of pounds in profit, with some due to see returns of up to 71 per cent.
An almost unknown City company, Innisfree, with only 14 staff, is the largest single player in the PFI market, owning or co-owning 269 PFI schools and 28 hospitals.
According to accounts filed at Companies House, Innisfree’s profit margin was 53 per cent last year. A successful FTSE 100 company makes margins of around 6 per cent. David Metter, the founder and chief executive of Innisfree, owns almost three-quarters of the company and collected pay and dividends of £8.6 million last year.
The PFI deals include:A hospital which charged £52,000 for a job that cost £750. Demolishing a shelter for smokers resulted in the PFI contractor charging £2,600 a year for the “extra cleaning”.
A hospital in Bromley, south London, which will cost the NHS £1.2billion, more than 10 times what it is worth.

This can not be real! Can it…?