Hospitals are placing patients on the controversial “pathway” to death without proper training for staff or even understanding how it works, some of Britain’s leading specialists in care for the dying have acknowledged.
In an article in The Telegraph on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway Dr Bee Wee, a consultant and President of the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland, says that “some hospitals appeared to be treating the pathway as just another ‘thing to be done’ rather than as something to be handled with extreme care”. She emphasises the need for proper training where a system of care designed for hospices is transplanted into the different environment of a general hospital.