Liverpool Care Pathway - Time To Make Our Hospitals Safe

This is Mail Online on 13th March -

The elderly must be kept out of dangerous hospitals…

What if our elderly require curative hospital care? Should they still be kept out of hospital because hospitals are ‘dangerous’? Isn’t it time to make our hospitals safe...?

Tens of thousands of vulnerable and elderly patients should be treated in the community, the doctors say, where they will be more safe than in hospital.

The appeal follows the public inquiry into hundreds of avoidable deaths at Stafford Hospital.

Is this a tactical shift of emphasis...? Is this part of the policy to lower expectations, to shift care away from the curative toward the palliative?

How can hospitals be ‘dangerous'? Should hospitals be dangerous? 

(Guardian 19^th March)

Isn’t it time those who have attained the age of respect were once more accorded the respect previous generations accorded them?

The Mail Online article continues, 

Meanwhile, the health expert appointed to instil a culture of ‘zero harm’ in the NHS has said the health service can only be restored if there is a new culture that tolerates not a ‘single injury’. 

Professor Don Berwick, a former adviser to US president Barack Obama, says all staff should aspire to provide the ‘safest health care in the world’.

Don Berwick...? 

Don Berwick...! That Don Berwick? Medicare Director under the Obama administration...? Cohort of Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel and Communitarian Healthcare? Delaying or denying access to medical innovations if your Communitarian profile doesn't fit? That Don Berwick?

That Don Berwick! Well, that makes it all clear, doesn't it?

That Don Berwick.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act decides who gets life-saving treatment and who does not. As over here, doctors will be advising elderly patients and counselling them to see the glass half empty and not the glass half full; to downsize their options and not expect expensive curative treatments. “Hello, EoLC…!”

Don Berwick, the said Director and administrator of Medicare and Medicaid Services, was responsible for a policy to pay doctors who advise patients on end-of-life care, and advance directives. This had been dropped from the Healthcare Reform Bill, should there be claims that it would encourage euthanasia.

Medicare doctors will make yearly medical “wellness” visits. Medicare will compensate doctors for discussing “voluntary advance care planning,” and EoLC.

Effectively, they’ll be looking for their ‘one percent’.

Communitarian Healthcare (so-called Obamacare) is coming home.