While it’s true that we all must die, no one knows when—and neither do doctors. Yet they are placing people on a death pathway that hastens death, and in the case of children results in horrific and extended torture.

by Heidi Stevenson

The British National Health Service (NHS) makes it profitable to put people on the death pathway—to effectively euthanize them. The result is what we’ve come to expect from a medical system whose first interests are profits: an immediate dramatic increase in people left to die without food or water, and their deaths speeded with overdoses of drugs.

The official euphemism for this process is the Liverpool Care Pathway. It was intended to ease the suffering of people whose time has come. But that is obviously not how it’s being used. Fortunately, some doctors are blowing the whistle.

This system of death is not only used on the elderly, but also for children and newborns. While it must be acknowledged that death cannot be avoided—that we are, indeed, all destined to die—it’s the height of hubris, of a medical system gone mad, to presume to know the time of an individual’s death, or even whether it’s inevitable at that time. The fact is that there have been occasions when people have been pulled off the death pathway and survived.

I’ve little doubt that some doctors believe they’re doing the good and kind thing—but they’re surely doing it with blinders firmly in place. Yes, we all must die, but no doctor has the right to give drug overdoses that speed death, as is done in adults, or to withdraw nutrition and water from children so they die in agony.

This is the reality, as exposed by doctors who’ve witnessed it. Adults placed on the death pathway die, on average, within 33 hours. That’s little more than a day. Not even withdrawal of nutrients and hydration can explain this speed, especially in light of patients surviving when they’ve been pulled off.

In the case of newborns, the average stay on the death pathway is ten days! That’s ten days without food or water. Nothing is given for pain. One doctor who has cared for these babies wrote in the BMJ:

They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.

Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues.

I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.

Dr. Laura J. De Rooy, a neonatologist, responded to the anonymous article: “It is a huge supposition to think that such infants do not feel hunger, or thirst.”

The Daily Mail reports that Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, has written to the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office:

The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.

The Profit Motive

It’s obvious that alleviation of suffering is not what’s behind the UK’s move to euthanasia. The NHS has been placed under tremendous stress. Funding has been cut. GPs have received immense increases while providing less and less service, both of which necessarily stress the rest of the health system. (People unable to get care from the GPs are flooding the emergency services.) Rates of chronic illness have drastically increased, putting yet more stress on the system. It must be noted, though, that NHS policies, such as increased vaccination rates, advice to avoid the sun and use sunscreens, and massive overuse of antibiotics resulting in antibiotic resistant diseases, have had a great deal to do with the increase in chronic disease.

Now, though, hospitals are given bonuses for meeting goals, and the trusts that administer them are often giving those bonuses for increasing the number of people placed on the death pathway. If the first concern of most doctors were the welfare of their patients, then the lure of profits wouldn’t result in an increase in the number of people put into the path of euthanasia. But it does.

The Telegraph reports that more than 6 out of 10 trusts are giving these bonuses—and where they’re given, the number of people placed on the death pathway has increased dramatically. Central Manchester University Hospitals have increased the number by 87.7% in just one year. A Bradford trust has had an increase of 51%. The Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals in Berkshire got more than £1 million for meeting their death pathway goals.

This is euthanasia for profit and a means to clear hospital beds so that more people can be “served”.

Is There a Solution?

Obviously, we aren’t going to end death, and there does often come a time when its inevitability must be accepted. That, though, is no excuse for a system that actively kills people or leaves children to suffer. Clearly, prizes for putting more people onto the death pathway must be ended. But even more needs to be done.

A system that could even come to this point needs to be recognized as utterly corrupt. That there was no outcry within the system to stop it before it happened tells us that. Whatever happened to telling parents that there was no more to be done—and then allowing them to take their child home? The medical system’s role should then be to provide palliative support so that the child could die in the comfort of their parents loving arms.

People report that they’re coerced into allowing their loved ones to be placed on this pathway—or not even advised that it’s being done. Read this chilling tale of how Ann Clwyd’s husband died to see the truth. Her husband had been a fighter against the cruelty of battery farming of hens, but she stated that he was crushed “like a battery hen” in a bed too small and that nurses treated him with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt”.

Mrs. Clwyd was once on the Royal Commission on the NHS and served on the Welsh hospital board, yet it did her and her husband no good. In fact, he died of their “care”; he died of a hospital-acquired infection that led to pneumonia. She described his death and being unable to even get the nurses to provide him with adequate warmth:

It was us again who covered him with a towel because he was cold and we couldn’t get more than two thin blankets to cover him with. And it was us who put socks on his feet because they hung over the end of the too-short bed .

I can’t believe anybody calling themselves a nurse could fail to give someone who is very ill that kind of attention but it was completely missing. Nobody should have to die in conditions like I saw my husband die in. I have tried in the past to get Bills through parliament on the welfare of battery hens. My husband died like a battery hen.

This is not palliative care. It isn’t humane. And it clearly isn’t being done for the benefit of patients.

Not only do people need to speak out against the corruption of the practice, they also need to act to prevent this travesty from happening to them. Recognize and accept that modern medicine cannot prevent death. Insist that dehydration never be used to hasten your death. Insist on being allowed to care for your child yourself or in a facility that does provide palliative care when there’s nothing more the doctors can do.

Ask yourself why hospitals have become the standard location of death. Any dignity is lost in hospitals even when life is saved. When death is likely, it’s obvious that the last place you or your loved one should be is in one.

Sources:

• Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor’s haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan
• NHS millions for controversial care pathway
• British Hospitals Make Millions Euthanizing Patients
• Ann Clwyd: my husband died like a battery hen in hospital
• How it feels to withdraw feeding from newborn babies