Wednesday 30 January 2013

Liverpool Care Pathway - Comments from the Petition Sites


Dear Secretary of State...,

These who are your  petitioners -


06:52, Jan 28, Ms. Hannah sweeney, United Kingdom
It is up to the family memebers to agree to putting a patient on this pathway!!!!!!! This should NOT be a decision made by someone who doesnt know the patient! I watched my grandad starve and was so out of it and hungry was trying to eat my hand evreytime i touched him.! the only means of fluid he was given was by ME! through squeezing water out of a wet tissue!! THIS IS DISCUSTING!!! My grandad should have been allowed to die with dignity! and i now know why he was so scared to ever go the hospital!!!! Because they do NOT care once you are past a certain age!!!!!!!


07:04, Jan 27, Mr. Graham Clarke, United Kingdom
I think that the real question has been overlooked... Just why are there Hospices? Up until the late 60's all hospital deaths occurred on the wards; patients were tended with dignity, compassion, and respect. As more people were taken away to die in a hospice, the experience available to the general nurse in caring for people with complex treatment or personal needs was removed. Coupled with a general almost inorexable decline in standards of care, passing away for most people became a hit and miss experience. Instead of addressing the problem and meeting the needs of both patients and staff, misguided attempts to correct the situation occurred, the latest of which is the L.C.P. We need more trained staff who are human enough to deliver what is needed...

04:20, Jan 26, Dr. J Lofthouse, United Kingdom                                                                                                            
Without consent, ALL of these deaths constitute Corporate Manslaughter by the Department of Health, National Health Service and Primary Care Trusts. 

12:49, Jan 21, Rebecca Pope, United Kingdom
When my nan was dying of cancer at home (had weeks to live), we as a family, were constantly pressurised into agreeing to this sick plan (despite the facts that my nan was eating, drinking and communicating normally, and kept saying that she wasn't in any pain). We had to fight to protect her from this horrible death pathway, we had to fight several district nurses over and over again. The whole thing is totally sick and barbaric.

13:06, Jan 13, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
Aggrieved. Direct experience. Still in shock that is is allowed. No consent. No conferral. Equally so with the DNR without one word to family. standing by. Beware. It is cunning.Make sure you stick a paper on forehead BEFORE the A&E entrance stating "I do not consent to LCP". It will prove a Lifeline for your loved ones who are not mentally aware!

00:55, Jan 10, Ms. Francesco Errante, United Kingdom
We must stop this new holocaust!We must stop this new holocaust!

10:07, Jan 09, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
It is WRONG to put people on this pathway without fully consulting their next of kin. In my eyes, the mistakes made are tantamount to murder and as such, should be suitably dealt with.


05:17, Jan 09, Huw Roberts, United Kingdom
This is instituationalised murder for the sake of cost reduction - it's insane!Do we already live in some dystopian science fiction society where the state kills it's elderly?

06:38, Jan 02, Mr. Charles Nigel Barrow, United Kingdom
Uptill recently I believed that a doctor could be trusted because of his oath to protect and do his best for his patients, but sadly this and the previous government are in my eyes as bad as the the worst members of the nazi party, and not many in the health service appear to be concerne

19:59, Dec 08, Mr. dean wales, United Kingdom
You are failing both your oath and your patients.Ive seen it and was powerless to stop it.The LCP is being misapplied to end the lives of those for whom it was not designed and for whom terminal was not a term that should have been applid to thier case-They were not terminal until the decision to place them onto this pathway was taken.Ergo you are euthanising patients, and to target the elderly is a form of genocide.

18:46, Dec 03, Mr. johnny meehan, United Kingdom
it is starvation and dehydration, followed by an induced coma, then death.to take a persons life is murder.

06:43, Dec 02, Mrs. Elizabeth Anderson, AB
It is a duty incumbent upon every medical person to protect life and do no harm.Everyone deserves to be cared for and not be denied/ refused water and food or ect so they die even if they are dieing. They need/deserve care and their needs met by those able to give./help

13:22, Nov 30, Mr. bambos charalambous, United Kingdom
it is against all ethics and gods commandment to killno one has the right to take life

04:59, Nov 30, Ann Mallaby, United Kingdom
Is involuntary euthanasia government policy? Why are these cruel and unlawful killings of our senior (or disabled) citizens allowed? What kind of people are the doctors and nurses who carry out such inhumane acts? Why are the police not recording, investigating or prosecuting these crimes when reported by distraught relatives? There's no need to pass laws to legalise assisted suicide - those who wish to die have the LCP at their disposal.

15:26, Nov 29, Ms. C Morrison, United Kingdom
The LCP has been abused to introduce euthanasia by the back door into UK. There must be a truly independent Inquiry into the LCP and all end of life care.

06:46, Nov 29, Mrs. sharon mullen, United Kingdom
my mum was put on this, without any discussion with the family.never forgive myself, feel I let her down badly, doctor didn't even have the courtesy to see her, died week later, even though she was in a council run nursing home, the police had to be called because she hadn't seen a doctor within a week, most traumatic and upsetting for everyone, seeing your mother go through this, not diginified and kind, I don't think.

13:33, Nov 25, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
A dear friend of ours took 12 days to die under this regime. If I had left an animal in that condition I would, I hope, have been taken to court by the RSPCA. My husband and I are in our 80's without relatives and now fear for our lives!!!

16:10, Nov 19, Mrs. Lesa Weight, United Kingdom
To be defenceless and to slowly die without a say, a word, a wish,is a horendous way for a life to end.THIS MUST NOT CONTINUE

05:46, Nov 19, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
Conditions must be revised: 2 medics, one a consultant, both of whom have seen patient within previous 24 hrs. And family MUST be consulted.

10:49, Nov 08, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
The LCp is Murder nothing less and Doctors are exocutioners.If you are over 70 in the Uk and have serious illness you will be left to die without the correc ttreatment. The LCP is just another way of killing off the elderly as we seem to be regarded as a burdon these days.The right to life and treatment is a human right abd should be protected.


01:54, Nov 08, Name not displayed, United Kingdom
The terminally ill/ old/mentally unstable should be given a choice to live or die yet euthanasia is illegal. How so is it then acceptable to kill people against their and their families will? Surely this is murder, a criminal offence. It's disgusting


01:03, Nov 08, Ms. Alessandra Ferrari, United Kingdom
Just one word to describe this practice and all those involved in implementing it;:LEGALIZED CRIME AND CRIMINALS Just one word needed to describe this heinous practice and all the cowards involved in implementing it; LEGALIZED CRIME ;


00:46, Nov 08, Anish Lakhani, United Kingdom
THE LCP IS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. THERE NEEDS TO BE AN IMMEDIATE ENQUIRY INTO THE NHS' practicesWe should organise a protest outside parliament


00:42, Nov 08, Ms. Rhy-nnice Trelfa, United Kingdom
Speaking from experience this is not something that should be allowed without the choice of the patient and if they aren't able to give their feelings on the matter then it's MURDER!The right to life is not somebody else's decsion to make!


00:33, Nov 08, Mrs. philomena grace, United Kingdom
God gives life and God takes it away,Doctors shpuld not play God.Every living moment is precious, and a person should be allowed to live out their last days as comfortable as possible, depriving them of food and water is a terrible death


Petition signature comment by james sommerville

Date: January 14, 2013
A course of action has been taken that will have lasting consequences. The withholding of any medical treatment is going to undermine the very character and charter that the NHS was set up for , and that is to provide care and meet the needs for the sick and the infirm. On that basis alone it has betrayed and sacrificed those principles. So whats next death camps for the over 70s. because if we don't step back from this cliff edge this is exactly where it will take this country. Far fetched. No doubt Germany an intellectual nation would have thought the same at one point. But it still happened. Care must be for life and not when some doctor decides otherwise and simply writes someone off because its convenient to do so.

Petition signature comment by J Khant

Date: December 19, 2012
Your current scheme, ie allowing those who wrote and implemented the LCP to 'review themselves' is not the sufficient response. You could have ordered a Public Inquiry..where evidence is given on oath, in public- instead of which , MCPCIL are busy back dating all of the documentation on their website to ensure there is no evidence left of their wilful neglect , ineptitude, lack of compliance documentation and your own Corporate Manslaughter. A sham review, and a total mockery of any notion of 'Democratic Accountability'.

Petition signature comment by Lynda Pedley

Date: December 11, 2012

I am still traumatized by my Mother's death after she was refused treatment & put on the Liverpool pathway without my consent.

Petition signature comment by SUSAN BLANEY

Date: December 4, 2012
My mother was referred to Marie Curie Hospice by her GP to gain a better quality of life at home, she did not have cancer and she was not dying. My mother never came back home as she passed away after being put on LCP by a doctor at the hospice without any of the family being contacted to discuss my mothers health. We are all absolutely appalled by this and have spoke to my mothers doctor who was very unsympathetic about my mothers death, we also wrote letters to Hospice complaining but got nowhere. 8 moths since my mothers death we are all falling apart as we cannot believe this has happened and why it happened. LCP is just a way of murdering the elderly when they should still be enjoying life with all their family for many years to come. We all feel something needs to be done asap to stop this happening to other people and there families as i would never want anyone to go through what we have and still are, i honestly feel i will never be able to get over the shock of what has happened.

Petition signature comment by Susanna Leoni-Smith

Date: November 7, 2012

It is disgraceful that the medical profession have allowed themselves to be perverted from the Hippocratic Oath.

Petition signature comment by D Lofthouse

Date: November 4, 2012
Digusting money oriented medicine....quack quack quack quack...what sort of beasts become doctors nowadays?

Petition signature comment by Louise Garvey

Date: November 2, 2012
Something needs to be done about this!! Negligence happens in the NHS, it costs the NHS milllions every year. When negligence occurs in using this pathway, the results are catastrophic, you only have to look at the stories of all these families who feel that they have lost their loved ones unnecessarily, or nearly lost loved ones through the misuse of this pathway. Improve the regulations surrounding it's use and make sure that families are in agreement and give written consent etc. It would be interesting to compare the figures of people who are put on this pathway in private hospitals compared to NHS hospitals

  • Murray Mc Neill EASTWEMYSS, UNITED KINGDOM

    It will be a sad day if this is how we are going to treat the sick, just another way for our uncaring government to save money under the guise of supposedly caring for the sick and terminaly il. A dangerous road to take.
  • Maureen Hall LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

    I saw the agony my brother suffered after he was put on it without our knowledge.
  • Gary Dickson DURHAM, UNITED KINGDOM

    The right to reach a natural end is consonant with the dignity and value of human life as opposed to any other form of life.
  • joan sheridan LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

    father suffered the same fate in a hospice - put in to soon; and refused food for 40 days !!
  • Anne Hampson PORKELLIS HELSTON, UNITED KINGDOM


    My father was put on this against my wishes and died 5 days later.We were told he could not swallow but when the morphine pump became accidentally disconnected he regained consciousness, had a conversation with us for over 2 hours, passed water and asked for a cup of tea which he was able to drink.The with holding of fluids is inhumane. You wouldn't tyreat a dog like it and if you did would be prosecuted for cruelty. I hope this petition will highlight the pernicious use of this practice and prevent another family going through the same experience.
  • Mary Nightingale ROTHERHAM, UNITED KINGDOM


    Get this disgusting practice of killing people out of hospitals.
  • Sheila Gardner NETHERSEAL, UNITED KINGDOM

    This is important to me because they nearly starved me to death.
  • Charlotte Peters Rock KNUTSFORD, UNITED KINGDOM


    Because this stated 'care' is a cold and calculating way to kill the elderly and babies, with no thought for their own welfare - and none for that of their close friends and relatives. Also it was used on 18 April 2004 to murder my father, Ralph Winstanley. It took from 18 April until 23 April 2004 to enforce this gruesome death - and all with no food nor fluid. It took a man who was upright, walking, standing, sitting, eating, drinking – all with no help - and assaulted him with increasingly heavy drugs loads, until he became unconscious. That took three days. He was then kept unconscious for a further three days until he was dead, in spite of my protestations that he had not been dying. This was done at his home in Doncaster
  • C Morrison HARLOW, UNITED KINGDOM

    My daughter has a chronic health condition, one of those listed as one of the grounds for putting patients on the LCP. The LCP should be banned and there must be full accountability and patient/family consultation in the NHS. The NHS needs to become the caring and compassionate service it once was.
  • Victoria Croker BRISTOL, UNITED KINGDOM
    Because no one should have to die like this.








Liverpool Care Pathway - An Irremediable Flaw


You can pretty much tell when someone is wandering precariously close to the edge of the precipice, but that isn't to say you can tell if they're going to topple over just yet, or any time soon.

If a medical professional takes the leap and decides that's it, your time's up, and puts you on the LCP, that's tantamount to a decision to give that little nudge in the right direction to topple them over. That's why the LCP is the LKP - a Licence to Kill People.

The Neuberger inquiry’s terms of reference will focus solely “on the use of the LCP model rather than on re-evaluating the model itself”.

Rebrand, revamp, damaged goods is still damaged goods.

This is Catholic Herald -



Peer calls for Liverpool Care Pathway to be abolished

By SIMON CALDWELL on Wednesday, 30 January 2013

One of Britain’s leading legal experts has said that the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway should be abolished and replaced with a new end-of-life framework.
Lord Carlile of Berriew also suggested that doctors who placed patients on potentially lethal end-of-life regimes without their consent should be struck off the medical register.
The Liberal Democrat peer said reforms to the system must begin with dropping the term “Liverpool Care Pathway”.
“It does no good for Liverpool, it does no good for care and as pathways go it is nearer to the River Styx than the Mersey,” he said in a reference to the torrent that in Greek mythology separated the earth from Hell.
He said that following the independent inquiry under the chairmanship of Baroness Neuberger, who will report to the Government in the summer, the “best elements” of the LCP “could be part of a much-improved end-of-life strategy”.
But he told a meeting in the House of Lords that “whatever is put in its place, and I have every confidence in Julia Neuberger, it cannot be the Liverpool Care Pathway”.
He said that best practice would also have to be applied consistently if a replacement to the LCP was to have the confidence of the public.
Lord Carlile also expressed shock at the large number of families who have complained that relatives had not given their consent when they were placed on the pathway, which often involves heavy use of sedatives and narcotics and the withdrawal of food and fluids, resulting in death in an average of 29 hours.
He suggested that the situation warranted the intervention of the General Medical Council, the regulatory body of the medical profession.
“I spent about 10 years, as an MP, as a lay member of the GMC,” he said. “If a surgeon decided not to tell a sentient patient that in order to save his or her life he was going to have to remove a leg he would be struck off the register for serious professional misconduct.
“The Liverpool Care Pathway is being provided without the consent of either its sentient patients or – where they are not fully sentient or do not have full (mental) capacity – their relatives.”
He added that he also believed that patients should never be placed on an end-of-life pathway by doctors who did not know them.
Lord Carlile is one of the most highly-respected barristers in Britain and was sought for his legal expertise when he was appointed by Tony Blair as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in 2001.
The son of a Lancashire GP, he has taken an interest in end-of-life issues that recently led him to co-chair the anti-euthanasia group Living and Dying Well.
His comments in the Lords, expressed in public for the first time, contrast starkly with the insistence of Government Ministers that the LCP is “good medicine” and an effective framework for the treatment of patients in their final days and hours.
The Government insists that any abuses stem from the misapplication of the pathway and consequently the Neuberger inquiry’s terms of reference will focus solely “on the use of the LCP model rather than on re-evaluating the model itself”.
Lord Carlile’s remarks came during a meeting arranged by Baroness Knight of Collingtree to give peers the chance to hear from doctors convinced that the LCP is flawed, rather than misused, and that the inquiry does not go far enough.
These include Prof Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist with East Kent University Hospitals NHS Trust, and a Catholic, who told the meeting the LCP was “dangerous” because it was founded on the “irremediable flaw” that doctors were able to predict when a patient might die when there was no objective way of making such a diagnosis.
The meeting was held just days before Auxiliary Bishop Tom Williams of Liverpool, chairman of the healthcare reference group of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said in a letter to The Tablet that Catholics applying the LCP well in palliative care were “doing the Lord’s work”.

Liverpool Care Pathway - This Is What They Do




Morphed into oblivion!

This is what happened to my dear mum.

They will do what they do because this is what they do and who may question otherwise? They are doctors. Doctors save lives. Doctors fight for us. They are on the front line of Death's dark threshold. Nurses are their foot soldiers. This is what they do. This is their vocation...

This is BBC News Berkshire -




30 January 2013 Last updated at 11:28

Newbury widow's anger over husband's hospital death
Leslie Weaver was admitted to hospital last November

A widow who said her husband was put on an "end-of-life" care plan without her consent has criticised his treatment.
Norma Weaver's husband Leslie, 89, went into West Berkshire Community Hospital on 9 November and died a week later.
Mr Weaver had leukaemia, but his widow claims he was put on the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway without her knowledge or agreement.
The health trust said it could not comment on individual cases but confirmed it was investigating.
Mrs Weaver, 78, does not know if her husband agreed to be put on the care pathway, under which doctors can stop treatment for terminally ill patients.
'Sharp tongue'
"There are loads of answers I want and I intend to get them, not only for Leslie's sake now he's gone, poor darling, but for other people coming up," she said.
Mrs Weaver, from Newbury, said she was contacted by the Thatcham hospital after her husband was given morphine.
When she arrived he was unable to speak.
"That's the hurtful thing, that I couldn't say goodbye to him or speak to him," she said.

"People tell me he could hear me but that's no consolation because I couldn't hear Leslie answering me back with his wittiness and his sharp tongue."
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust offered Mrs Weaver its "deepest sympathy".
A spokeswoman said: "We are aware of Mrs Weaver's concerns which we are investigating.
"However, patient confidentiality means we are unable to comment on individual cases.
"The Liverpool Care Pathway may be used to support the end-of-life process at our hospitals but this is discussed fully with the patient (if alert), their family and their GP and consent is obtained from all parties before proceeding."