not what i really needed to find out today

I don't think any company should be able to create a policy that literally prohibits its employees--that would be staff, including trained medical staff at a senior living facility--from trying to save someone's life and perform CPR. When I say "I don't think" what I mean is, are you fucking serious?

Below cut for triggering material, including links to information about the death of a patient in an independent nursing facility, links to audio and partial transcripts of the 911 call.



Actually, yeah, that can happen. For seven fucking minutes.

I heard some of the 911 call--did I mention the entire thing is seven minutes?--on the radio, which, if you're curious, is exactly as chilling as the article makes it sound. It's not that I don't get a company would try to pull something like this, because companies are run by people and people suck when they can put everything in the abstract; what I don't get is that, in general, a person doesn't suck, and this is about as concrete as it gets.

ETA: as I hit post when I went to get other links by accident.

Nursing Home CPR Case: Glenwood Gardens Defends Nurse Who Refused To Help Ailing Patient

Retirement Home's 'No CPR Policy' Makes No Legal Sense

Listen: Nurse Refuses To Give CPR To Dying Woman - link at the bottom to the an mp3 of the 911 call

Dramatic 911 tape reveals dispatcher’s fight to save patient; nurse refuses to help - this has a partial transcript of parts of the conversation between the nurse and 911

Ethics required medical staff to do CPR, even if policy didn't, bioethicist writes

Comments

[amireal]

Something about it seems off, not the least of which is the completely composed and specific statement.

[seperis]

I'm not guaranteeing it or anything, but the daughter's response has shown up in a lot of articles so far. Though for my part, I'm desperately hoping like a lot that this was taken out of context and perhaps said well before her mother died or when she was talking theory or something. *crosses fingers*

[amireal]

I'm thinking it's either taken from before a majority of the info came out OR that the 911 operator stumbled into a situation that was meant to play out that way but was poorly constructed.

..I sound like a conspiracy theorist. But I can't find a better way to explain it.

[(Anonymous)]

Same anon as above. I can believe that the above statement was made by the daughter after her mother's death, after hearing the phone call, knowing that CPR may have been able to prolong her mother's life. I'm not a nurse and I don't work in nursing home but I do work in a peripheral field. I've come across a situation where a family actually pulled an admitted nursing home patient out of the hospital half an hour after they had been admitted because they didn't want them to be treated at the hospital. I think the daughter knew exactly what type of care she was signing her mother up for and I think the facility is catering to these types of people.

[seperis]

...so that's chilling as hell.

[amireal]

Yeah that's basically what I'm saying, though I mean, a DNR will solve that problem anyway? Which is why it sounds so insane? When my mother and her siblings decided to remove the feeding tube from my grandmother and put up a DNR the nurses in the home looked at them like criminals, but they were legally tied.

So I feel like the situation was set up that way on purpose, but at the same time, I feel like I have to be missing something b/c it's not like it's so hard to prevent CPR in the first place.

eta: The decision for my grandmother was a very hard one for everyone involved, so no one come in and argue about the feeding tube okay? The situation was... difficult and the end of a very long road.

[(Anonymous)]

I apologize if my posts sounded accusatory. I think this is a shitty situation that is bringing up a lot of ugly memories for a lot of people.