Media shunning euthanasia reports

Only if these horror stories are wrapped up in tales more palatable will the national UK press consider publishing

- JACQUI DEEVOY

GETTING the truth about the ongoing involuntary euthanasia in NHS facilities into the mainstream has been an uphill struggle.

Since early 2021, I've been asking editors and staff writers at UK national newspapers and websites to consider running this shocking and ignored story but, to date, they've not been interested.

Brian Davies, before and after the care home

Many times, I've pitched individual stories from relatives who've lost loved ones to deathly end-of-life pathways and protocols, but still no takers.

So last year, with the help of Gillian Broughton, one of the members of my support group, Relatives of Victims of involuntary Euthanasia, I decided to take a different approach.

During the course of our many conversations over the last four years, Gillian told me how her father Brian Davies, 86 when he died, was "abused, neglected and murdered" in a Merseyside care home in 2021. I'd tried to get mainstream editors to publish his heartbreaking story, but they didn't want to know. We had to come up with a plan.

Then, one day, as Gillian was telling me how her parents had won the postcode lottery but had died before they could spend their winnings, something clicked. A headline already forming in my mind, I had a feeling the Mail Online would go for this story. We would wrap the sorry tale of Brian's horrific and untimely demise in a more palatable story of an elderly couple who won the lottery.