In his recent statement, senior consultant Professor Patrick Pullicino has claimed that thousands of elderly people being treated at NHS are subjected to death by doctors, either due to patients being unmanageable or to empty the beds.

Prof Pullicino said, “NHS doctors are prematurely turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly”.

He stated that Liverpool Care Pathway, a method deployed for providing care and treatment to patients, who are suffering from life-threatening disease, but he warned that a majority of the doctors have no idea of how to implement the method.

The method comes into play, only after doctors believe that they cannot save the patient despite any treatment and that they will die. The method might use any of the steps, which brings the patient death within 33 hours. The method is used widely across the country hospitals.

Each year, as many as 450,000 deaths of people are administered, those of who died in hospitals or under NHS care. Out of 29% is due to LCP.

However, in many of the cases, it has been encountered that elderly patients are subjected to LCP, despite the fact that they can live longer; as a result the method has become assisted death pathway.