An 88-year-old woman starved to death in the last 28 days of her life after doctors withheld nutrition and hydration from her following a stroke.
Sarene Taylor was admitted to a hospital in North Wales, but according to her son, Rob Taylor, doctors said there was nothing that could be done to help her. She was sent back to her care home, but with orders to have nutrition and hydration withdrawn — meaning she was sentenced to die slowly and painfully.
“I understand end of life care, and the carers and district nurses do a fantastic job but to deny a human being food and water is disgraceful,” Taylor said in a statement. “And we as a society need to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Taylor’s death has raised concerns that people, particularly the elderly or disabled, are being placed on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway, which was officially abolished in 2014. There are reports that this unethical pathway is still being practiced; one report, commissioned by Parliament, found 16 cases of people being treated as if they were on the pathway. “Thus in many of our case studies, patients … were experiencing an end-of-life care pathway which was similar to the LCP in all but name,” Professor Sam Ahmedzai said.
Roughly half of the patients placed on the pathway did not consent to it, and though they could have survived, they were still slowly dehydrated and starved to death.
One of the patients in the report, Laura Jane Booth, was just 21 years old and had Patau’s syndrome, or Trisomy 13. She had gone into the hospital for an eye operation, only to be placed — unofficially — on the pathway. Her parents fought to have an inquest performed, during which medics said that “Laura had outlived her time with multiple conditions.” Yet her parents had not been notified that she had been placed on an end-of-life pathway.
“She had no nutrition for the entire three-and-a-half weeks she was in,” they said, adding that even in intensive care, “still nobody did anything about Laura not feeding. Nobody ever told us that she was on an end-of-life care pathway.”
Taylor said it was “inhumane” and “heartbreaking” to watch his mother lay in a bed and suffer for the last month of her life due to a lack of standard care. “This is how you would treat people back in the 11th and 12th century – not 2023,” he said. “It’s absolutely harrowing.”
