"It's basically designed to bring hospice-style care to terminally-ill people in hospitals. Inevitably people do die in hospital but they weren't getting the quality of care in those final few hours."
Mr Hunt said many patients did not want to die "with lots of tubes going in and out of their body" but would prefer their final moments with their families to be "dignified"
"The Liverpool care pathway was developed with Marie Curie, with Macmillan, with Age UK and a number of other charities, to try and bring that dignity to people in their last moments," he said.
A national audit recently disclosed that almost half of dying patients who were placed on the controversial pathway were not told that life-saving treatment had been withdrawn.
The study suggested that about 57,000 patients a year are dying in NHS hospitals without being told that efforts to keep them alive have been stopped.
It also revealed that thousands of dying patients were not given drugs to make them more comfortable.
Mr Hunt said patients and their families must always be fully informed. "What should never happen is that people should be put onto that care pathway without patients being fully in the loop and their families and relatives being fully in the loop as well," he said.
The minister confirmed that he was looking into reports of problems with the care pathway.
"I would be very sad if as a result of something that is a big step forward going wrong in one or two cases we discredited the concept that we need to do a lot better to give people dignity in their final few hours," he said. "Most people would prefer to die at home – we need to do a lot better."
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