Up to 50pc of deaths at Mid-Staffs NHS trust on Care Pathway

[Northerner]

UP to 50 per cent of patients dying at the scandal-hit Mid-Staffordshire NHS trust have been placed on a controversial ?pathway? to death, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

Figures disclosed by the hospital under the Freedom of Information Act show that use of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) rose markedly in the wake of the introduction of targets promoting its use in 2009.

The system of care, intended to give patients greater dignity and less pain in the final hours of their lives, is under review after claims that medical staff across the UK had put people in it without proper safeguards.

It involves removing treatments deemed to be more harmful than helpful including, where appropriate, reducing food and fluids.

But a series of families have come forward to claim that their loved ones were placed on the treatment regime without any consultation or even when they were not imminently dying.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h...-at-Mid-Staffs-NHS-trust-on-Care-Pathway.html

 

[trophywench]

The LCP is actually intended to work as per Hospices do - palliative treatment.

When you have an 85 year old woman in the final stages of inoperable bowel and other bits of her, cancer, which she has been battling for the past 10 years until the periods of vomiting her excrement etc finally became constant instead of sporadic, decided she'd had enough thanks and had admitted defeat and knew as we all knew, she would die this time in hospital - WHY oh WHY did that hospital take it into their heads to instigate really aggressive AB treatment of the pneumonia she now had from being bedridden? Oh sorry - we didn't realise she had had a fatal diagnosis .....

THAT is when the LCP should be used.

We've all met people who need drugs for this and drugs for that and another half a dozen drugs to stop the side effects of the drugs ad infinitum. Well, when you are actually in the final few weeks of your life, what does it actually matter if eg your cholesterol goes a bit high? Especially if your muscles ache because of the drug to keep it lower in the first place?

 

[Abi]

LCP is a good thing as long as it is initiated appropriately ( patients and relatives involved in the decision where appropriate)
I'm sure some unscrupulous health care professionals misuse it on occasions. Either because they have become jaded and ageist or due to unreasonable pressure from managers e.g. to discharge back to care home when active treatment in acute hospital may be more appropriate