Liverpool Care Pathway - A Good Death... Or A Good Life?

Mr. Lamb has asked a panel of experts to undertake a "wide-ranging review" of the LCP guidelines. This will be the umpteenth version! They're like Microsoft.They roll out the new platform before they've ironed out all the problems and let the punters find the errors for them. Trouble is the LCP is no virtual Death Ride; it's the real McCoy!

Mr. Lamb is also “uncomfortable” using the word “pathway” in relation to death. He has asked a panel of experts  to "come up" with something else. How unfortunate for Mr. Lamb that he does not like the sound of the word "Pathway" in relation to death. He should count himself lucky he has not found himself launched forth upon it!

Whatever euphemism Mr. Lamb's (death) panel of "experts" might dream up, it's the same dirty process.

I am distraught and I despair that these events have befallen this family. The picture is of me and my lovely mum, murdered on the NHS (National-socialist Health Service). Murdered. Is that too strong a word? Her life was taken without her permission. By omission and by commission, actions taken and not taken conspired to end her life. She was kept in ignorance of what was proceeding before her very eyes, as were we. Was she, then, not murdered?

Eight years before the Pathway took her life from her, my dear mum was diagnosed with cancer and given a death sentence of six months. She was not "dying" when they put her on the Pathway and  she was not "dying" then! She just needed curative rather than palliative care. 

My dear mum, ever forthright and determined,  survived an operation and lived.

"This controversial programme was developed in the 1990s at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital in conjunction with that city’s Marie Curie Hospice. It was intended to enable the terminally ill in hospitals to have the sort of “good death” available to patients who are cared for in their last days in hospices. 

Widely praised by many in the medical establishment as “taking the sting out of death” by ending artificial efforts to prolong life and focusing instead on making the end as comfortable as possible, it has been widely adopted throughout the NHS."

(The Telegraph)

Her operation was by no means a "futile" course to follow. She wasn't prepared to just lay down and die without a fight. It was the same indomitable spirit that saw her, that saw this country, through the Second World War. It provided her with another eight years of life, not optimum but happy, and only cut short at that by this murderous protocol.

Here follows a story of a Liverpool lass, 74 years young.

This is a story of a lady who, reportedly, was denied a curative treatment that could have saved her life. It has been policy in the NHS to deny curative treatments to the old.

This is the Liverpool Echo -

Liverpool gran died after failing to get treatment for lung cancer, inquest hears

• by Kate Forrester, Liverpool Echo
• Jan 9 2013

A GRANDMOTHER died after she did not receive treatment for a tumour growing in her lung, an inquest heard.

Philomena Murphy went to Aintree hospital for an X-ray in July 2007 after complaining of chest pains.

A “nodule” or collection of abnormal cells was found in one of her lungs but the 74-year-old never received further treatment.

She was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer five years later at the same site where the nodule was found - after making 70 trips to her GP complaining she felt unwell.

But the disease had already spread and she died in October 2012.

An inquest at Liverpool Coroner’s Court will examine whether the Fazakerley mum-of-three could have survived had she been given proper treatment after the discovery was made.

At a mention hearing yesterday coroner Andre Rebello said: “In my reading of the file this lady would not necessarily have died, as a result of the cause of death she had, had she had the treatment that she could have had at that time.

“But what I do not have is details of that treatment.”

Mr Rebello said he wanted to find out why Mrs Murphy was not offered treatment five years ago and requested a statement from a doctor who dealt with her at the time.

But Aintree Hospital NHS Trust said he had since left the hospital and bosses had been unable to contact him at his last known address. A spokesman added that the General Medical Council had refused to give details of the doctor’s new address.

Mr Rebello said: “We need to hear evidence from that doctor in order to establish exactly what happened.

“The General Medical Council must know where this doctor is. We cannot progress the investigation without information from him.”

The coroner said if he could not be located he would refer the case to Merseyside Police and request officers trace the doctor to obtain a statement. The trust agreed to continue its attempts to get in touch with him.

It accepted Mrs Murphy’s case was a “serious untoward incident” but said it was unable to make any further comment until the conclusion of the inquest.

Mrs Murphy’s son Paul, of Huyton, told the court: “We want to know why my mother died so this does not happen to anyone else.”

The case is listed for a further mention hearing on February 12.