NICE on Steroids -- Crisis Standard Type Rationing in the UK

Many U.S. states have been drawing up plans for how to triage scarce resources in a surge situation triggered by an epidemic disease, terrorist attack, or natural disaster.  Such plans obviously call for rationing measures far more dramatic than those now being explored by public and private payers.  

But in the UK, the cuts already on the table are jaw-dropping.  Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”.  From the Telegraph, planned cuts include:

• “Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.”


• “[T]he board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.”


• “[S]avings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.”