The number of prescriptions for a powerful sedative that can kill the frail doubled at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, raising fears it was used to control elderly residents in stretched care homes – or even to hasten their deaths.
Official figures show out-of-hospital prescribing of the drug midazolam increased by more than 100 per cent in April compared to previous months.
An anti-euthanasia campaigner last night said he suspected that the spike was evidence that many people had been put on end-of-life protocols or ‘pathways’.
Professor Patrick Pullicino
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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.
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’.