Killing grandmom take two

UKTelegraph articles on the scandal:

• Investigation into Liverpool Care Pathway death
  02 Jul 2013
• Doctors warn Liverpool Care Pathway seen as 'one-way ticket to death'
  26 Jun 2013
• Leading doctor's fears about Liverpool Care Pathway
  03 Mar 2013
• Liverpool Care Pathway: fifth of doctors quesy about always telling relatives
  01 Mar 2013
• A pathway to dignity in death
  13 Jan 2013
• With its failings exposed, the NHS can recover
  

  13 Jul 2013 

  
  Doctors could face discipline

Financial incentives for NHS staff who place patients on the pathway are expected to be described as “totally unacceptable”.
The care pathway was originally developed at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the city’s Marie Curie hospice to ease suffering by setting out principles for how the dying should be treated.

It has since been introduced in the majority of NHS hospitals and involves the withdrawal of treatment and even fluids from patients assessed to approaching the end of life.
NHS protocols state that the patient, if possible, and their families should be consulted before someone is placed on the pathway.
But the system has been mired in controversy amid claims that it has been used actively to hasten death. In some cases, family members were not consulted before food and fluids were withheld from patients.
Some patients have even gone on to recover after being placed on the pathway supposedly because they were on the brink of death.
Lady Neuberger is a rabbi who has written on caring for the dying and was appointed to provide a “faith perspective” to the review.
Her team has held a series of meetings with families of those placed on the pathway who raised concerns about its operation.
Every year 130,000 patients are placed on the LCP, which usually involves heavy sedation with morphine or similar drugs. 

NHS executives could also face discipline.


the irony is that the sedation at end of life IS a compassionate way to treat those in pain.

But it also can be used to kill people, and the background of this is a country where shoddy care and overworked staff find it easier to just sedate than to care for terminally ill people, and of course the background is a "medical ethics" that has been undermined by the pro death folks who see the unproductive as useless eaters who should want to die, so let's help them along.