Liverpool Care Pathway - Going Through The Motions

Clearly, this farcical review is just going through the motions. Again, Mr. Lamb pre-empts its outcome. He has already declared a distaste for the term ‘pathway’; now, he scraps the LCP CQUINS. There’s going to be little left to do by the time the review drones on to its tedious and tiresome close.

This is MailOnline -

Tory MP Fiona Bruce has told how she saved her father’s life when she pulled him off the Pathway. 

She had already seen her mother die an ‘agonising’ death when she was put on an end-of-life pathway after brain surgery two years earlier. 

Miss Bruce said her 83-year-old father was admitted to a hospital, which she did not name, suffering from an unidentified illness that left him ‘weak and frail’. 

After a few days, a nurse had ‘almost casually’ told her: ‘He has not long to live. We are putting him on the Liverpool Care Pathway.’ 

Miss Bruce told a meeting in Parliament there had been ‘no  discussion, no explanation, no consultation’ between the family and the hospital staff. 

She said that her mother’s ‘heart-rending’ death after being deprived of food and fluids – without her family being consulted – had left her with a sense of ‘terrible guilt’. 

The Congleton MP contacted her sister and they insisted their father was removed from the Pathway. He was placed in a nursing home. ‘Now, well over six months later that elderly man is very much alive, eating well, getting up when he wants and resting when he doesn’t, enjoying visits from his family,’ she said. ‘He is looking forward to his 85th birthday.’ 

An end to payments for Pathway targets would free hospitals from the suspicion of taking money in return for the deaths of patients.

An end to payments for Pathway targets may free hospitals from accusations of accepting their thirty pieces of silver, but not from the suspicions of committing acts of corporate manslaughter. 

It will not free individuals from charges of crass lack of compassion who, with no compunction, permit the unthinkable to proceed as those who are very clearly not in their final hours waste away to their demise.

Will the review yet recommend that criminal charges be brought? People have died. If the review accepts a failure in training, as well it might, for it will not concede one jot that the LCP bears any blame in itself, then those who have rolled out this 'training' must be made liable. Whether it be individual responsibility or corporate responsibility, it is still responsibility. And someone must be held to account.

That cannot be shirked, shrugged off, but must be shouldered; that cannot be denied, dismissed, but must be dealt with.