A Catholic neurologist has criticised the Government’s new guidelines for care for dying people, warning that they are “worse than the Liverpool Care Pathway”.
Professor Patrick Pullicino, Consultant Neurologist and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Kent and Canterbury Hospital, said that the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines “undermined centuries-old evidence-based medical care”.
The guidelines, which were written to replace the Liverpool Care Pathway, were published in draft form last week and are open for consultation until September.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph Professor Pullicino, who is a consultant on care for elderly people and one of the first medics to raise concerns over the LCP, said that the NICE guidelines failed to take into account many of the criticisms of that Pathway.
“Diagnosis of who was imminently dying was the core problem of the LCP and is no better in the Nice document,” he argued. The new guidelines for diagnosis are “totally inadequate” and based on a “cookbook list of features”.
Despite the new guidelines recommending clinically assisted hydration for the first time, Professor Pullicino said that this section was a “disaster of misinformation, distortion and ambiguity” because it stated that death is unlikely to be hastened by withholding hydration.
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