>Top doctor's chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year
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>NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.
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>Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.
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>He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.
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>It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.
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>It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.
>There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.
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>Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.
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>He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.
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>Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated.
>He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’.

Successfully treated. For what? I assume the patient must be alive and healthy now.

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>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161869/Top-doctors-chilling-claim-The-NHS-kills-130-000-elderly-patients-year.html#ixzz1yK7gbr7D

Better off doing health care Jake's way. If you have the $$, you get health care. Otherwise, drop dead.