The death of the Liverpool Care Pathway

The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) has attracted controversy since its development in the late 1990s, sparking debate amongst healthcare professionals and public alike. In the last 12 months it has come under fresh criticism from the media following a series of articles published in the Daily Mail that claimed that the LCP was a method of hastening the deaths of terminally ill patients through starvation or dehydration, one writer claiming that this was in order to save hospital beds.1,2 Such reports were not exclusive to the tabloid press. A recent article in The Telegraph describes how the Scottish Fatalities and Investigation