‘Doctor who put Mum on the death pathway should be facing court’
THE daughter of a 93-year- old woman who died after being wrongly put on the discredited Liverpool Care Pathway yesterday demanded that the junior doctor involved be prosecuted.
Pat Brogan said the hospital doctor who decided that her mother Winifred was dying and who ordered that all treatment should stop had escaped with a slap on the wrist.
She also dismissed the £1,000 compensation payment her family had been offered by the NHS trust that runs the hospital as ‘an insult’.
It was offered after a report by the Health Ombudsman found that the old lady was in ‘robust’ health before she went into the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary in Wigan and all indicators suggested she was not dying when examined by the doctor.
A report by an investigator from the Ombudsman’s office said it could not be said for certain that Mrs Brogan died because of the decision to put her on the Integrated Care Pathway – the version of the LCP system designed to ease the last hours of patients that was used by that hospital.
But it said she should not have been denied life- saving care and ‘she was not given the best opportunity to live for longer’. The deaths caused by the LCP and the anguish of families whose loved ones died were highlighted in a Daily Mail campaign that led to its abolition.
under the system patients considered to be dying would no longer receive treatment to save their lives. Frequently, patients would be heavily sedated with morphine and then refused nutrition or hydra- tion. Pat Brogan, who is an auxiliary nurse, said: ‘She was sat up in bed talking and she was lucid. To me she wasn’t terminally ill. The junior doctor just gave up on her and said she was dying. I hold the doctors responsible but they have got away with it. They have just got a slap on the wrist. I think they should be taken to court. The pay- ment is an insult. It is not really about money, it is that someone takes full responsibility.’
Winfred Brogan, a former mill worker, from Wigan, was taken to hospital just after 9pm on november 7, 2013, suffering from pneumonia and sepsis, and was seen by the junior doctor at 2am.
The report said available medical evidence did not support the idea that she was dying. But three hours later the doctor put her on the LCP.
Her family objected and asked for her discharge. Mrs Brogan was discharged later on november 8, but without antibiotics recommended by a consultant.
She was re-admitted on november 13 after her condition worsened and died the next day. The report said it was ‘difficult to understand the haste with which the decision [about the Pathway] was made’.
The Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust has apologised to the Brogan family. It told them it had contacted the ‘experienced’ junior doctor, who no longer works for the Trust, to arrange ‘a discussion with him about his actions’.