Liverpool Care Pathway - Death By Natural Causes

This Programme has been doing its worst for years. This Programme has divided families and wrought devastation and grief in its wake.



This is Dr. Mark Pickering writing on CMF Blogs -

Negative media coverage of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) in recent months has been incredibly unhelpful, spreading fear and confusion amongst patients and relatives. A small number of well-publicised failures to use the tool properly have led to a widespread smearing of its name. Some media coverage has approached the hysterical, with implications that certain doctors are killing off patients in a Nazi-style cost-saving project that amounts to covert euthanasia.

‘Negative media coverage’.

‘A small number of well-publicised failures’.

The ‘Daily Fail’.

This is not 'negative' media coverage; it is factual.

This is not a 'small number' at all; it is large and it is cumulative and has been reported for years, not just in the Mail but across the broad spectrum of news media, both nationally and locally.

Jean Tulloch, 83, died in March last year at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh where she had been treated for a urinary tract infection.

Her son Peter, from Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, believes there is evidence to suggest doctors actively attempted to hasten her death by withdrawing her food and fluids for 30 hours. He has instigated a police investigation.

The family of Olive Nockels went to the High Court to have her food, fluids and treatment reinstated.

Mrs Nockels' daughter Ivy West and her grandson Chris, from Norwich, went to the High Court in London earlier this week where they won an order instructing the hospital to keep up treatment.

That was in 2003. This is BBC News -

BBC News

The doctors went back to the court in a case that brings to mind the ordeal of David James' family -

- BBC News

Mrs Nockels' daughter Ivy West and her grandson Chris, from Norwich, went to the High Court in London earlier this week where they won an order instructing the hospital to keep up treatment.

On Monday, a High Court judge ordered doctors at the hospital to provide food, water and treatment to Mrs Nockels until the rights and wrongs of the way she was being cared for could be established.

Legal battle

The court case was brought after Mr West, 32, claimed staff at the hospital were not doing all they could to prevent the retired school matron from dying.

But the next day the hospital won permission to administer diamorphine to control pain, which Mr West had objected to because he felt it kept Mrs Nockels unnecessarily sedated.

Mail Online reported -

and  The Telegraph -

BBC News  reported on the outcome of the inquest...

Mrs Olive Nockels was starved for four days and plied with diamorphine which kept her 'unnecessarily sedated'.

Giving evidence, consultant geriatrician Brian Payne, who examined Mrs Nockels, said she seemed confused when he asked her simple questions. 

Feeding tube

He said that when he broached the possibility of fitting a feeding tube she had not responded apart from telling him to stop or go away.

Mrs Nockels 'seemed confused...'

The Coroner's verdict: Natural Causes.