New end-of-life care rules ‘worse than death pathway’

END-of-life care guidelines are ‘dangerous and wrong’ and could be even more disastrous than the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway they replaced, an expert claims.

Patients could find themselves in an early grave thanks to the new NHS rules, which could leave staff to ‘guess’ which are dying and hasten their death, he said.

Professor Patrick Pullicino, a leading critic of the Liverpool Care Pathway, said the latest proposals from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence were ‘totally wrong and very misleading’ on the crucial subject of patient hydration.

He said: ‘Overall they’re quite similar to the Liverpool Care Pathway, they still have the problem of diagnosis but in addition, in terms of hydration, the language is very ambiguous. There is even a part there that says that withholding artificial nutrition does not hasten death. It’s definitely going to. The whole area on hydration was so badly written – it is so misleading and it is wrong.’

Developed in the 1990s at a Liverpool hospital, the much-criticised LCP was phased out in 2014 after fears grew that patients were being starved and left to suck on sponges for a drop of water. Written as a treatment programme for looking after the dying, it was axed after examples of neglect and inappropriate treatment came to light.

But Professor Pullicino claims the new proposals mimic many of the LCP’s key problems, including how hospital staff decide who is actually dying.

He added: ‘The problem all along with the LCP was how staff were left to guess who was dying without any proper diagnosis, but this just skips over that and doesn’t go into it. By this time we should be either concentrating and knowing better and doing some research on it, or else we should just take these pathways away.’

A professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Kent, Professor Pullicino had a patient survive 14 months after being taken off the LCP. He recommends a return to ‘ordinary compassionate care’.

A NICE spokesman said: ‘The draft guideline is open for public consultation and we welcome any comments.’ ÷ A new attempt to legalise assisted dying proposes ‘suicide courts’ to decide whether desperately sick patients can be helped to end their lives.

A Bill to go before MPs next month says High Court judges should decide whether a terminally ill person can demand to be killed by their doctor. It gives judges just two weeks to make their ruling – a deadline criticised as far too short.