Secret plans to withdraw hospital care from over-70s in the case of a catastrophic pandemic have been branded “totally unacceptable” by charities representing older people.
Confident documents produced following a pandemic planning exercise in 2016 proposed a “triaging” system to be put into operation if healthcare resources were exhausted, under which people in nursing homes could be offered “end of life pathways” instead of medical assistance.
The government said the proposals related to “hypothetical scenarios” and had never been adopted as official policy.
But Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams told The Independent that Britain had come “perilously close” to an approach of this sort at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic last year.
And she said that the government and NHS should be clear that treatment decisions must always be based on clinical need.
The documents on “NHS surge and triage” and adult social care in the case of a pandemic, labelled “confidential” and “official sensitive”, were obtained by an NHS doctor under freedom of…
