A Maltese consultant neurologist at East Kent Hospitals and professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent has claimed that the UK's National Health Service kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year, according to UK media.

Speaking to a conference of the Royal Society of Medicine in London, Prof. Patrick Pullicino said NHS doctors were ending patients' lives prematurely because they were difficult to manage or to free up beds.

UK media quoted Prof Pullicino as saying that doctors had turned the use of a controversial death pathway, known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

The LCP, which is used in hospitals all over the UK, is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.

It can include withdrawal of treatment, including the provision of water and nourishment by tube. On average, it brings a patient to death in 33 hours.

Around 29 per cent of deaths in hospitals in Britain are of patients on the LCP.

Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer were placed on the LCP. He said he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated and live another 14 months.