Press releases

On the 60th anniversary of Sue Ryder providing care to those with life-changing illness, including those facing their end of life, we welcome their report findings that end-of-life care should be personalised, and that the patient should be at the centre of decisions make about their care.

A research paper which explores people’s preferences during the dying process was recently published in Policy & Politics journal. 23 participants, aged over 65 (a mixture of ‘well’ general public, people living in residential care and patients in receipt of palliative care), were interviewed.

People facing the end of their lives must be confident that their wishes will be respected in their final moments, and this sad case shows that we are a long way from this being a reality in some cases.

These papers report on findings from a European telephone survey aimed at investigating peoples’ preferences for the disclosure of information regarding poor prognosis, likely symptoms and problems, and available care options.

The GMC has updated its guidance on personal belief and medical treatment for doctors. Doctors do have the right to opt out of providing a particular procedure because of their personal ‘beliefs or values, as long as this does not result in direct or indirect discrimination against, or harassment of, individual patients or groups of patients’, nor cause distress to them.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has launched its Quality Standard on supporting people to live well with dementia.

We welcome the panel of independent experts announced by Baroness Neuberger this weekend to run a review into the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). We also endorsed the call for the public’s input into the investigation and encourages people to submit evidence.

We are currently trying to gather evidence of how people fare when they attempt to fill in the forms themselves, without legal or expert help.