20000 signatures reached
To: NHS England, the Government, the Health Secretary
Save the Liverpool Care pathway
Overturn the decision to cast aside the Care of the Dying Pathway or Liverpool Care pathway under which name it has been vilified in the popular press.
Why is this important?
It's important that patients in England can and rightly should expect to be treated with care, compassion and that every attempt is made to preserve their dignity at the end of their life. This is important not only for the patient themselves but also their families. The Liverpool care pathway is used in situations where modern medicine is unable to prevent a patient's deterioration and where they are expected to die within the next 48-72 hours. It ensures that symptoms which are entirely predictable and a natural part of dying are assiduously looked for and controlled to ease a person's suffering at the end of their life.
The loss of the pathway will effectively remove medical ad nursing staff's ability to ease patients' suffering as they are dying and will lead to futile
and extraordinary measures to prolong life where there is no chance of improvement or recovery. At a time when families should be able to calmly reflect and celebrate the lives of their loved one in peace, instead patient's final days and hours will be transformed into a frenzied circus of intravenous cannulae placement, nasoenteric feeding tubes, 6 hourly infusions of fluids and antibiotics and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Allow patients to die in peace and enable our hospital staff to facilitate this as they have been doing since the inception of the Liverpool pathway.
