10/12/1999
AGE Concern this week demanded a government inquiry into allegations of 'involuntary euthanasia" after it was revealed that police are investigating 60 cases involving pensioners allegedly being starved to death in hospitals. The Daily Telegraph, which ran a series of articles on the scare, quoted one London doctor as saying: "There are severe pressures on beds, and in order to relieve this there maybe a tendency to limit care inappropriately where you feel doubtful about the outcome."
Hospital Doctor reported that both the Government and the British Medical Association had immediately dismissed the allegations as being "without foundation." But, undeterred, a Telegraph leader described the claims as "appalling but, in a gruesome way, not entirely surprising." It went on: "The health service inevitably reflects the values of the society that sustains it. We are generally very keen, rhetorically at least, on children. If a hospital must spend a huge portion of its budget on a life saving operation for a baby, we tend to approve. But our attitude towards old people is harsher. Euthanasia and poor care are both rooted in the feeling that, once past a certain age our lives have no real value."
"There can be few more frightening thoughts than that those who are supposed to come to your aid are actually likely to be your executioners instead," said Dr Anthony Daniels in the Daily Mail. "Of course, it [may] emerge that the allegations of involuntary euthanasia are false." But, he added: "The NHS is a stone from which no more blood can be squeezed. .. It wouldn't be surprising in the circumstances if some [doctors] decided it would be better for society as a whole - and for their hospital in particular- if certain types of patient were to die rather than to take up further scarce and valuable hospital resources."
Gerard Greaves in the Express wrote of "elderly [people] being quietly killed off' by doctors and of hospitals rapidly becoming half-way house[s] to the mortuary." The allegations, he said, indicate a wider malaise in the NHS. "Old people are being shunted into geriatric wards, denied specialist treatment, viewed as an encumbrance and dismissed as a drain on finite resources. In a period of life when a sense of dignity is one of the last remaining comforts, such callous disregard is abhorrent."