SIR – I was horrified to read your report (T&A, November 3), which says that 85 per cent of NHS Trusts, including Bradford Teaching Hospitals, have adopted the (so-called) Liverpool Care Pathway, which can involve withholding food and drink from terminally-ill patients.
It is also supported by leading clinicians and charities such as Marie Curie. The NHS Trusts receive financial incentives totalling millions of pounds, and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust qualified for £490,000 more than two years after doubling the number dying on the Pathway to 51 per cent.
Food and drink are not treatment. They are basic care and to withhold them is cruel and painful for the patient and amounts to euthanasia under the guise of care. How can it possibly be called care when your report tells of a woman in Blackpool, given two days to live and had feeding tubes removed, made a remarkable recovery after her family defied doctors’ orders and gave her water through a straw?
In future I will not be supporting any health charities supposedly caring for the terminally ill unless I can be assured they do not support this infamous system.
A Callaghan, Wood View Drive, Bradford
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