Thursday 10 January 2013

Liverpool Care Pathway - What Is An Optimum Life...?

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"Listen to the full emotional clip below"

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LISTEN: How MP Saved Dad From Death Pathway


An MP has told LBC 97.3 the moving story of how she saved her father from the Liverpool Care Pathway, three years after her mother endured an ‘agonising’ death on the system.


Fiona Bruce MP told Julia Hartley-Brewer that her parents was placed on the Liverpool Care Pathway "almost casually" and with no consultation with relatives.
Known by critics as the Death Pathway, the LCP allows doctors and nurses to reduce fluids and medication for critically ill patients to allow a dignified death. 
Mrs Bruce said: "It took my mother weeks to pass away [on the pathway], which was agonising for her and heart-wrenching for the family."
Asked if she was effectively starved to death, Mrs Bruce added: "After she passed away, I was wracked with guilt that that might have been the case and I thought I should have asked more questions. I should have protected her or prevented such a long degree of suffering.
"About three years later, my father was taken to hospital because he was feeling unwell. He was 83. After a few days, I asked the nurse in the corridor how he was and I was told almost casually with no consultation with me at all, 'He's not very well. He's not going to live. We are putting him on the Liverpool Care Pathway.'
"By that time, I knew what the LCP meant and I didn't want my father to suffer like my mother had.
"So we moved him to a nursing home. There, he was treated and six months later, he's still alive." 
Listen to the full emotional clip below


This is the "People's NHS".

GPs are drawing up their Death Lists.

They want the old, the weak, the frail, to take on this responsibility for themselves - and acknowledge a duty to die, to go for the palliative rather than the curative option.

Categorising someone as 'end of life' is the first nail in the coffin.

What is the point, after all, of the futility of a few extra months, years of less than optimum life...?

Just ask Fiona Bruce's dad. He could give you a few pointers..!

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