A woman whose father suffered a stroke is urging doctors not to let him die on a controversial end-of-life scheme.
Rosemary Munkenbeck’s 95-year-old father, Eric Troake, is currently in Frimley Park Hospital, where she says doctors have “written him off”.
“I just want him protected,” she said.
“He’s looking at us and talking to us. He’s not suffering from a terminal illness, he just had a stroke.”
Mrs Munkenbeck is worried about her father being put on the Liverpool Care Pathway, a scheme critics say can cause premature death.
Under the scheme, patients who meet a set of criteria are diagnosed as close to death.
Doctors can decide to stop giving such patients food and fluids and put them on continuous sedation until they die.
Mrs Munkenbeck says her father has already been taken off an intravenous drip, and believes he has been “forced” down a route from which there is “no going back”.
She said: “We don’t know that he will die. He might do, he might not, but we feel that’s not the doctor’s decision to do that.”
A spokesman for Frimley Park Hospital said: “The Liverpool Care Pathway allows patients to face dying with as little discomfort and as much dignity as possible while they are given appropriate individualised care.”
The LCP scheme has been rolled out across hundreds of care homes, hospitals and hospices across the country.
Mrs Munkenbeck’s comments follow a recent bid to change the law on assisted suicide which failed in the House of Lords amid concerns about the danger it could pose to vulnerable people.
Last week, a senior police officer said the police would need to be careful if the assisted suicide law changed because it could be used to get rid of vulnerable elderly people who are considered a ‘burden’.
