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Professor Patrick Pullicino has claimed that doctors are using a care pathway designed to help make people’s final days more comfortable as an equivalent to euthanasia.

The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is used in hospitals for patients who are terminally ill or are expected to die imminently. Under the pathway, doctors can withdraw treatment, food and water while patients are heavily sedated.

Almost a third of patients – 130,000 – who die in hospital or under NHS care a year are on the LCP.

Professor Pullicino said he believed the LCP was being used as an “assisted death pathway” with patients placed on the LCP without clear evidence, according to the the Daily Mail.

The senior consultant at East Kent Hospitals told the Royal Society of Medicine he had personally intervened to have a 71-year-old man taken off the LCP and be treated successfully, despite claims he was expected to die within hours or days. He had arrived in hospital with pneumonia and epilepsy.

The Daily Mail (UK) adds after an interview with Dr. Pullicino,

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’.

He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.