Is the Liverpool care pathway euthanasia?

However, in recent months the LCP has come under intense media scrutiny, with the Daily Mail describing it as ‘a pathway to euthanasia’,2 compromising patient autonomy, used to ‘free up hospital beds’ and even for NHS trusts’ financial gain.

What is the pathway when someone is dying?

An end-of-life care pathway is a document that leads care practitioners through somebody’s care plan in the final weeks of their life. When there is an indication that they are dying, the care pathway will be embarked upon and it will follow the requests and desires of the patient and their loved ones.

What was wrong with the Liverpool care pathway?

One reason for problems with the Liverpool Care Pathway, and more generally in care of dying people, is a general lack of familiarity with the dying process, a lack of discussion and a lack of involvement in it.

Where did the Liverpool Care Pathway come from?

Hospitals were also provided cash incentives to achieve targets for the number of patients placed on the LCP. The Liverpool Care Pathway was developed by Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in the late 1990s for the care of terminally ill cancer patients.

Why was the care pathway for the dying patient created?

It was developed to help doctors and nurses provide quality end-of-life care, to transfer quality end-of-life care from the hospice to hospital setting. Now discredited, the LCP was widely abused as a ‘tick box exercise’, with patients being casually assessed as terminal, heavily sedated,…

How did Sam long’s mother die in Liverpool Care Pathway?

But not everybody has had a bad experience of the Liverpool Care Pathway. It is now four months since Sam Long’s 69-year-old mother died in the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. She was admitted after suffering a brain haemorrhage that left her unconscious and unlikely to survive – according to specialists from two different hospitals.

What happens in the first stage of the care pathway?

In the first stage of the pathway a multi-professional team caring for the patient is supposed to agree that all reversible causes for the patient’s conditions have been considered and that the patient is in fact “dying”.