Universal Care (read Obamacare) has ways to "un-block" hospital beds. Ready for....Just unplug the ventilator and pull the feeding tube!
Killing
patients who are difficult to manage is wrong, but who would want to go on
living as a vegetable?
By
Robert Lefever
PUBLISHED:07:52 EST, 21 June 2012| UPDATED:11:13
EST, 21 June 2012
Old people are difficult to care for in
hospital. They tend to have multiple medical problems and may be very confused.
One specialist believes that, for these reasons, the NHS is in effect using
euthanasia to un-block hospital beds.
Professor Patrick Pullicino says that doctors
use a controversial ‘death pathway’, the Liverpool Care Pathway, when they
believe that it is impossible for a patient to recover and that death is
imminent.
This process may involve withdrawing
treatment, including water and nourishment by tube. Death usually follows
within 33 hours. Almost a third of all deaths in the UK each year come about in
this way.
Prof Pullicino says that far too often
elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP so that it is now
an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’ in terminal care.
It would be very wrong if patients are being
killed because they are difficult to manage. But I myself would not wish to go
on living unless I have reasonable control of my body and full control of my
mind.
Just because something medical can be done,
it does not follow that it should or must be done.
My father's mind went to heaven three years
before the rest of him. From his private pension, the family paid for his care
in a private nursing home. Eventually he had a stroke. Technically, it might
have been possible to keep him alive even then. His heart and liver and kidneys
and all other body organs were working well. Only his brain had gone.
If he had been in an NHS hospital, with a
readily available 'crash team', it might have been possible to keep him alive,
more as a vegetable than as a sentient human being. But what for?
In that state, I believe that it would have
been better for him to be treated on the Liverpool Care Pathway. He should be
allowed to die in peace, rather than officiously kept alive.
As the man he was, and as the father I loved,
his life was over. Only parts of his physical body would have been ticking
over.
It might have been possible to continue that
pathetic existence for weeks, months or even years, until one organ after
another finally gave up.
But should each of them have been treated
with a transplant, simply because that might have been possible with the
miracles of modern science? And should the state pay for that, while inevitably
limiting the resources available to other people who might gain greater
benefit?
If he had been capable of paying for his own
continuing medical 'treatment', would it have been right for him to be given
it?
In that circumstance, would the doctors
really have been helping my father or would they simply be demonstrating their
own cleverness?
And if he had been in a private hospital,
would they have kept him alive in that wretched state, purely because it paid
them to do so?
And if I suggested that life support should
be turned off, would I have been thought to be motivated by protection of my
own inheritance?
It seems to me that Professor Pullicino, may
not have thought sufficiently deeply into these issues. He may see them purely
from his own professional perspective. His ideas make news but would they bring
happiness or, alternatively, prolonged wretchedness?
Is he truly considering the
interests of patients, or of their families, or merely those of his own
professorial department?
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