Great Britain's National Health System is coming to terms with the recession and the first to lose out are the most vulnerable: the elderly, the terminally ill, people declared dead even before they are dead, because trying to save them or make them better costs too. A few days ago one of the undersecretaries of Health, the Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, did not hesitate to invite general practitioners to compile a list of their patients who could die within a year. Once identified, the terminally ill will be called to a meeting with the doctor who will ask them where they prefer to die and if they want to write or dictate a living will in which they give doctors permission to suspend medicines and nutrition when the end is announced.
Lamb, who announced the government's plans at a recent end-of-life conference, said he expects at least one in 100 patients for every doctor to be put on the "terminable" list. The reasons are very pragmatic: «A quarter of the beds in hospitals are occupied by terminally ill patients – he explained -, and among them four out of ten do not require medical treatment. If these people were admitted to the emergency room one less time, Healthcare would save one billion and 350 million pounds a year », about one and a half billion euros.
The exponent of the conservative-liberal government did not specify what will be the fate of the sick who ended up on what various British newspapers have dubbed the "death list". But it is very probable that they will be destined for the "Liverpool Care Pathway", a protocol adopted for the first time in the nineties in a hospital in the port city, and which since 2004, after being recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, has become common practice in healthcare institutions across the Kingdom. On paper, "Lcp" looks like an end-of-life program to make a patient's last period more tolerable, in the country that is the cradle of palliative care. In reality, the protocol ended up also resulting in the suspension of treatment and nutrition and in the administration of strong sedatives to people classified as "close to death".
Every year the national health system records 450,000 deaths in its facilities; of these, 130,000 are people subjected to the «Lcp» properly or improperly. The Ministry of Health, after the many controversies raised by the programme, has repeatedly reiterated that the Liverpool Care Pathweay is not comparable to euthanasia, that patients who undergo it are monitored and can be removed from the protocol if they show an improvement . But in recent months there have been increasingly insistent and numerous complaints from families who accuse doctors of having introduced their loved ones into the program when in reality they were not dying at all and of having accelerated their death due to the suspension of cu
