Liverpool Care Pathway - Playing With Lives

A proportion of funding is withheld and paid on condition that targets are met. It is pure semantics to argue that the CQUINs which will restore the shortfall withheld, and more besides, are anything other than exactly what they are - incentives.

Putting those targets in place is playing with lives.

This is Lynn News -

Sunday 27 January 2013
KING’S LYNN: Hospital chiefs reject pathway cash ‘bonus’ claim
Published on Saturday 26 January 2013 09:30

Hospital chiefs say a payment relating to the use of a controversial palliative care treatment was not an “incentive”.

Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital received £225,000 Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUINS) money from the primary care trust or the Liverpool Care Pathway in 2011 and 2012.

The pathway was developed to help terminally ill patients by withdrawing treatment but it has recently come under fire.

Director of patient experience Gwyneth Wilson said the hospital received the money for its quality of care.

The payment included the costs associated with recruiting additional specialist staff to train nursing and medical teams in the appropriate use of the treatment plan and development of an associated administration system.

Ms Wilson said: “The payment is made on the condition that we have achieved an agreed level of quality in our standards of care. It is categorically not an incentive payment for identifying patients to commence end of life care.

“The Liverpool Care Pathway is a nationally-agreed standard for end of life care devised by hospices. It allows acute hospitals to offer the same high level of care that patients with a terminal illness would expect if they chose to spend their final days in a hospice.

“Introducing the LCP in our trust involved recruitment of two specialist nurses who were then able to introduce an extensive training programme for doctors and nurses throughout the trust.”

The CQUINS system introduced in 2009 to make a proportion of hospital’s income conditional on demonstrating improvements in quality and innovation in specified areas of care.

2 comments

Olly Beak

3:30 PM on 26/01/2013

They used the pathway on my brother who went home to his family after we intervened. He died over a month later and I have been waiting since August for a reponse to the letter I sent them concerning the event. If they were paid for the level of care they devolved in his case they would not recieve a penny. The whole system is open to abuse amd nisinterpretation.

violetkathy

2:42 PM on 26/01/2013

It's a shame the extensive training programme wasn't up to scratch then isn't it? My brother was on the LCP and unconscious until I arrived at the hospital and started to give him fluids and he regained consciousness. The LCP is a deeply flawed method of delivering care. There is no way to scientifically predict death and fluids should never be withheld from patients just because they are presumed to be at the end of their life.