Liverpool Care Pathway

Debate between Robert Flello and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I am glad to have this opportunity and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) for raising this important subject. We all know that the Liverpool care pathway was devised with the best of intentions. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) that none of us wants to end or take away palliative care. We all want to relieve pain and we all want people to die with dignity, but there are serious concerns about the Liverpool care pathway and that is why this debate is so important. Those concerns have been expressed by physicians. It was physicians—ethicists—who started this debate, not the newspapers. The newspapers did not start the ball rolling and we should be aware of that. Professor Peter Millard, emeritus professor of geriatrics at the university of London, and Dr Peter Hargreaves, palliative care consultant at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, have warned of the risk of “backdoor euthanasia”—their words—and that economic factors are being included when treatment is considered. We must be aware of these concerns, which were originally expressed by clinicians. However, I believe that it is one of the chief duties of those of us in this House who are not clinicians to speak up in defence of the vulnerable, the voiceless and those who are sometimes forgotten.

It is simply unacceptable that vulnerable people, including the poor, the elderly and those who do not have close friends and family to look after them, come to a premature death—an unnecessarily early death. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and others have said, in numerous cases, even friends and family caring for a loved one have not been informed that they have been put on the LCP. May I say that my hon. Friend’s speech was a wonderful speech? It drew on her personal experience and was one of the most moving speeches that I have heard in this place over many years.

I sat with my best friend, Piers Merchant, as he was dying; he was a former MP and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) will remember him well. I saw the morphine being pumped through his body. I am sure that he died early—perhaps a few hours or even a few days early, I do not know—from the morphine. Those of us who loved him wanted him to be cared for properly, but we also did not want him, or any of our loved ones, to be put on an irreversible path to death where that was avoidable.

I welcome the statement by the Department of Health that it

“has consistently made clear that care provision, including for people at the end of life, should be based on need.”

But the question that we need to ask in this debate is this: how are the Department’s intentions implemented on the front line of medicine and hospital care? No doubt there is wonderful care being given in many hospices, but is that gold standard being replicated in all our hospitals?

It is undoubtedly true that the LCP has led to the premature death—it may not be premature by much, but it is still a premature death—of as many as 130,000 hospital patients each year. This is a vital issue that we must address in this House; with 450,000 hospital deaths in Britain each year, that figure of 130,000 is about 29% of the total number of hospital deaths. In fact, this is a frightfully serious issue.

[Robert Flello]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Leigh]

Does the hon. Gentleman mind if I do not give way? I just want to make my speech and give my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) a chance to speak too.

Professor Pullicino, who was quoted earlier, has himself personally intervened to have a patient taken off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated. So, despite the fact that we must listen to clinicians, it is simply impossible to determine satisfactorily that a patient has hours or days left to live, which is one of the worrying flaws of the LCP.

In November, an independent inquiry into the LCP was announced, and I welcome that announcement. My hon. Friend the Minister is doing his job extremely well in this regard, and we respect him as somebody who will genuinely try to get to the truth. He himself has said that there have been too many cases of patients dying on the pathway while their families were not informed, so he is quite right to zero in on that issue. He has said, “This is simply unacceptable.” I echo those words and I hope that he will repeat them when he winds up the debate.

Of course there are people who speak on both sides of this issue, but I believe that any inquiry must be conducted by a suitable variety of individuals and not just by supporters of the LCP. It is not good enough to state, as the Department of Health sometimes does, that the LCP is not euthanasia. It might not be euthanasia and, of course, if it is implemented properly it is not euthanasia. However, it has become obvious to many people that the LCP can be employed, and indeed has been employed, in cases that are highly questionable.

I say to those who have spoken today that what worries me is this: why is it that the average time to death on the LCP is 33 hours? An identical figure for average time to death was found in two consecutive national audits that were conducted two years apart. In the view of many people, that shows that the LCP has a machine-like efficiency in producing death within 33 hours, and that is why some people say that the LCP is in effect a “lethal care pathway”. Statistics suggest that fewer than 5% of patients put on the LCP are taken off it. Why only 5%? There is something wrong here, and the inquiry needs to get to the bottom of it.

I believe that we should appoint a member of the judiciary rather than a medical expert, to carry out the inquiry. Of course, they will have medical advisers, but we should appoint a member of the judiciary rather than just a medical expert to lead the inquiry, so that they can look at this complicated issue with a fresh perspective and a judicial mind.

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Weir. In conclusion, I believe that we have a duty to instil confidence in each of the citizens and residents of this country that they live in a society that believes in their inviolable dignity as human beings, and that takes the necessary steps to ensure that they are cared for and looked after when they are ill, especially in the closing moments of their life.