LONDON, May 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A damning report by the UK’s Care Quality Commission, the body that oversees patient care in hospitals and nursing homes, has been cited by pro-life advocates as the result of a growing “culture of death” that has enveloped British health care since the adoption of legal abortion.
The falling standards of care in British hospitals and nursing homes, said Anthony Ozimic, communications manager for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, are a result of decades of deterioration in medical ethics. The incursion of utilitarian principles into medicine, starting with legalisation of abortion in 1967, has, he said, grown into the “perfect storm” in which the care needs of vulnerable elderly patients are seen as a burden on hospital staff.
“There is now a ‘perfect storm’ in the UK for the widespread killing of the sick, the vulnerable and the elderly,” Ozimic told LifeSiteNews.com.
When 96 year-old Muriel Browning developed an infection and sores in an Ipswich Hospital, her daughter tried to get her the care she needed, only to see her mother systematically neglected by nurses.
Mrs. Browning, a former teacher who suffered from dementia, was admitted to Ipswich Hospital in July 2009 after a fall in her nursing home. Her daughter said she had been left in a soiled bed with an unchanged incontinence pad by staff who would not help her use a commode or take her to the bathroom.
Her daughter, Angela Lawrence, a retired BBC journalist, said her mother was not given adequate help eating or drinking, and that her food was so bad as to be inedible.
She told media, “Because nurses are educated to degree level, they are contemptuous of low-level care. They think it’s beneath them.”
“She was in such pain from the bed sores that she had no dignity left, she lost the will to live and said ‘I want to die’,” her daughter said.
After her mother’s death in August last year, Lawrence made formal complaints to hospital management and the Patients Association, who instigated the CQC’s investigation.
The CQC’s report said that of the 12 hospitals they visited, 3 failed to meet minimum standards of care for elderly people. Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust and Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust could face enforcement action. Three other hospitals needed to improve.
The report said that patients were not being helped to eat, were not given enough to drink and were being spoken to in a “condescending manner”. The CQC report issued this week is only the first of an expected series after the Commission investigated 100 hospitals in the UK.
Pro-life advocates are unsurprised at the findings, and said that in a medical ethics environment where abortion and passive euthanasia by deliberate dehydration are both legal, and advocates for euthanasia are gaining ground in parliament, such results are only to be expected.
Ozimic, whose Master’s dissertation in bioethics was on “the effect of abortion on moral character,” maintains that the erosion of patient care can be directly linked to the adoption of anti-human concepts in medical ethics and laws, a change that can be seen in nearly every jurisdiction in the western world.
“Successive court judgments, laws and professional guidelines enshrining euthanasia by omission, plus elder abuse and a massive propaganda for assisted suicide has created a true culture of death.”