There's been some confusion about the vasopressin withdrawal discussed in the appeal hearing on Friday.
In the high court hearing with Justice Hayden, one of Archie's doctors gave oral evidence. She discussed exactly how ventilation could be stopped. There were three options - turn off the ventilator but leave all the tubing in place, disconnect the ventilator pipe near to the mouth but leave the endotracheal tube in place or remove the endotracheal tube in place.
I'm not sure exactly why this was discussed but my impression was that the hospital trust were trying to come to an agreement with Archie's family about exactly how care would be withdrawn, so it didn't have to all be court ordered or could be included in the court order.
I think as part of this they were trying to mediate some intermediate end of life care plan that both the hospital and the family could agree on. The family's position has been that Archie should continue to receive his current level of care and this could continue for an unknown amount of time but is likely to be measured in weeks. The hospital want to withdraw all care including ventilation and, as Archie cannot breathe this would mean that he would die within minutes.
The third option, was that ventilation and feeds would continue but that all other medication would end. This would mean that Archie would die in a matter of hours-days probably due to organ failure caused by fluid loss from his diabetes insipidus. Justice Hayden dismissed this idea fairly swiftly, and rightly too, because all this care plan would do is deliberately make Archie medically unstable before his death.
Why the hospital were even considering this idea, I don't know. All its done has caused more confusion because the High Court judges had no access to the doctor's oral evidence and it wasn't included in the high court judgement.
As a final note, the doctor giving evidence was quite concerned about having to give evidence in open court and only agreed because she was able to do so remotely via audio link.