From the UK Daily Mail:

NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.

It can include withdrawal of treatment – including the provision of water and nourishment by tube – and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.

There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.

Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.

He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.

Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated.

[…]Professor Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, was speaking to the Royal Society of Medicine in London.

[…]He said: ‘The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway.

‘Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.

‘Patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition.

More from a different UK Daily Mail article:

The health service ‘looks like a supertanker heading for an iceberg’, the head of the NHS Confederation has warned.

His comment came as a survey revealed the squeeze on NHS finances is so serious that almost half of its leaders think it will reduce quality of care for patients over the next year.

The research, carried out before the confederation’s annual conference in Manchester, shows that NHS leaders fear that growing financial pressures will mean treatment rationing and longer waiting times.

Of the 252 chief executives and chairs of NHS organisations questioned, almost half believe the financial burden on the health service is ‘very serious’ and 47 per cent say this means quality of care will reduce over the next 12 months.

Mike Farrar, chief executive of the confederation which represents organisations providing NHS services, said: ‘Despite huge efforts to maintain standards of patient care in the current financial year, healthcare leaders are deeply concerned about the storm clouds that are gathering around the NHS.

‘Our survey shows that many NHS leaders see finances getting worse and that this is already having a growing impact on their patients. In response, they are cutting costs in the short term but they know that much more radical solutions are the only answer in the long run.

[…]Mr Farrar added that politicians had ‘consistently failed’ to put the long-term interests of the population’s health above their short-term electoral interests.

[…]Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association said: ‘This survey confirms what everybody inside the health and social care system is already saying – the next decade is likely to be the most challenging one in the history of the NHS.

‘Treatments are being rationed, waiting times for elective procedures are going up and patients continue to be treated poorly on our hospital wards.

In a government-run system, whether you get treatment or not depends on a bureaucrat, whose only desire is to be re-elected. Sometimes, killing you is the best way for them to get re-elected, as seen in the euthanasia numbers. But, in a private health care system, it makes no sense to kill patients, because then the money stops coming in. Doctors actually care about you in a for profit system. They want to help you, and they want you to live.