Palliative care: More than one chance to get it right

摘要

In today's Lancet are the first two papers in the Every Newborn Series, campaigning to ensure that every baby has a healthy start in life through improved quality of care at birth. Equally important, and an area that often receives much less attention, is improvements in quality of care for people who are dying. This week sees the phasing out in the UK of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a set of guidelines developed in the 1990s intended to ensure comfort and dignity for patients at the end of their life, but one that has been widely criticised by the UK media and some patients and their relatives for failing to provide appropriate care.