THE excellent Echo report on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) programme highlighted some very serious issues for its supporters and critics like me.

The recent news by the Quality Care Commission stated that the Southampton General Hospital’s (SGH) administration is not fit for purpose, or safe to meet patients’ health and welfare needs combined with the Government’s health minister Norman Lamb in Parliament stating the Pathway care programme and its guidelines has “become a distortion of what it should be about”.

The Government has now started an independent review of all LCP policies and procedures led by the respected Baroness Neuberger and will publish results and recommendations in the summer of 2013.

Having failed to get any answers from management administration of SGH, although I do realise they are busy, struggling to make the hospital fit to provide basic medical care, can I use the people power the Daily Echo seems to give us in our city to get the SGH management to confirm if any care Pathway terminations are still being carried out, as I feel it would be irresponsible to ask the dedicated clinical, nursing and care workers to carry out these procedures until the full results of the review are published.

P J SOWERBY, Southampton