The woman didn’t have a DNR on file, but family says she would not have wanted CPR. The family seems to have no problem with how things went down.
A follow up article that still leaves many questions unanswered.
And that’s exactly why I find this lady’s behavior so disgusting. Wanting to keep your job is not a valid excuse for not trying to save someone’s life. It’s nearly 100% the message of the good Samaritan parable.
Either this lady was horribly anxious and was too scared to do anything, or she calmly decided not to do something. The first is understandable, but WhyNot claims this is not the case. That leaves the second. When you are calm, you are able to think. It means a conscious decision was made to value her job in front of even handing the phone to someone else.
The idea that the dispatcher was wrong about the necessity of CPR also is irrelevant, since the caller was not a nurse and thus had no way of knowing that, as she did not give that as a reason. Her reason was that she could not do it because it was against policy.
If she were an actual nurse, you might could make the argument that keeping her job allows her to save other lives. But she’s not even that. And, as stated numerous times, she could pass the torch on to someone else and was encouraged to do so.
Yes, the caller did deserve to be browbeaten. Her reasons were morally reprehensible. She did not avoid CPR because it might hurt the lady in her dying days or because she didn’t think it necessary. She didn’t even do it because she was scared. When all else fails, guilt can be a successful motivator and was the least the 911 dispatcher could do.
I’m not saying she needs to be tried as a murderer or anything. But what she did was in fact wrong, and she should be sorry about it. She should feel guilty.
Because, to the morals of people who have not been jaded by the medical profession, the dispatcher did what was right and the “nurse” did not. Most people put eschewing even a 4% chance of saving someone’s life as being worse than making someone feel guilty. Four percent is greater than zero.
And stop with the false comparisons to other “procedures” that are not used for the same purpose.
Later stories indicate that she is a nurse, however she was not being employed by them as a nurse.
And we have no idea what her motivations are, and I think it simplistic and naive to think that there was only one motivation. I think it far more likely that there were a constellation of motivations - the condition of the patient, the inappropriateness of the order, the likelihood of harm, the risk of causing physical or mental damage to bystanders, the written policy of the agency, the wishes of the woman, as evidenced by her family’s agreement with the decision - lots and lots of different things were probably going through that nurse’s mind.
Public perception of CPR is that it’s always appropriate and always effective and always saves the day. Realizing that it’s none of those is not being “jaded by the medical profession”. It’s knowing more than people learn from watching TV. It’s not about morals, it’s about medicine. It’s not that I never do CPR - I do - it’s that it should only be done when it’s indicated, same as any other medical procedure. Ok, you want a lifesaving example? People’s lives are saved with tracheotomies, too. You want I should go around stabbing people in the neck while they’re eating lunch? If they don’t need it, it’s not lifesaving, it’s just injurious.
Yes, I agree with you that employment concerns and lawsuits concerns *should not *be part of that decision making process. But I don’t know how to get around that with our current system of liability insurance and medical malpractice tort.
We’re already beginning to see how her employer is starting to hang her out to dry. The first day it was all, “No, no, she did everything right, look, here’s our policy,” and now we’re on to, “Well, uh, she misunderstood our policy, so we’re looking into it and rewriting that, sorry.” Do these sound like people who would have fought for her in a courtroom if she’d done CPR and caused injury and the family had sued?
You have no idea what the elderly lady’s condition was. My grandmother weighed 85 pounds and was so frail at the end that her skin was like tissue paper. No way would I have ordered or expected anyone to administer CPR to try and save her life under any circumstances. She’d suffered enough. The notion that we should valiantly try to save every life, via whatever means necessary, is very narrow minded. Sometimes the kindest thing to do is to not intervene with nature.
I would have done just what that woman did in the 911 call. Well, actually I would have hung up. The operator overreacted and ramped the whole thing up completely unnecessarily. I think the caller who was with the old lady knew perfectly well that CPR was not needed and she was trying to do two things: One, not cause panic in the dining room, and two, not get into an argument with the 911 operator. If she had tried to argue, who knows what kind of chaos that would have caused. She was trying to keep her responses, that everyone in the dining room with her could hear, as neutral as possible so as not to cause undue concern. She did the right thing.
There were no family members there, and the family members are quite happy with the care she received.
That’s a spam post for a medical malpractice firm.
Reported.