Tube-feeding for patients ‘should be a last resort’

Tube-feeding terminally ill patients should be used only as a last resort and not simply out of convenience, a new report has said.

The Royal College of Physicians and the British Society of Gastroenterology stated that doctors should not succumb to pressures to switch end-of-life patients to tube feeding unless it is absolutely necessary.

When a patient is near death, they sometimes naturally stop feeling hunger and stop taking food orally. Families that misunderstand the issues sometimes fear their relatives will starve, when force-feeding them is actually prolonging their death.

The report was written to clarify the clinical and ethical issues encountered by healthcare professionals, patients and their families and aims to sum up the issues surrounding tube-feeding in a concise, comprehensive manner.

Among terminally ill patients near the end of their lives, the report stresses that traditional oral feeding should be the main priority. It emphasises that care homes need to have enough staff to feed patients at all times, to discourage tube-feeding out of convenience.

Dr Rodney Burnham of the Royal College of Physicians said: “This report brings considerable and much overdue clarity to a very challenging area.”