LA Times: Ambulance Crews Told Not to Transport Patients Deemed Unlikely to Survive

Can you imagine what it must feel like going home at the end of your shift with the reality that you had to choose who to leave, abandoned to their fate? After nine months of fighting Covid-19, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers are already succumbing to burn out. Now they face the grim reality of what it means when their hospitals are overwhelmed. 

The Los Angeles Times reports that ambulance crews, EMTs, are now being ordered not to bring in people they think are unlikely to survive. 


The situation in Los Angeles County hospitals is so critical that ambulance crews have been advised to cut back on their use of oxygen and to not bring to hospitals patients who have virtually no chance of survival. Officials say they need to focus on patients with a greater chance of surviving.

The measures were taken as circumstances are expected to become even worse in coming weeks, when patients sickened over the Christmas holiday will need treatment, leaving officials desperate for ways to increase capacity and triage care to focus on the sickest patients.

In Los Angeles, hospitals are reeling from the Thanksgiving Day flood. They haven't yet seen the Christmas and New Years Eve covid victims.  


Comments

  1. TrailblazerJanuary 5, 2021 at 5:01 PM

    How can this happen in a country that has the best health care in the world?
    Choke, cough !!


    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJanuary 5, 2021 at 5:47 PM

      America's media have finally latched on to the Lord of the Flies meme, TB. Commentators are realizing this unprecedented shift to bifurcation goes beyond hyper-partisanship and into the realm of tribalism.

      As I've written many times, the United States has become a deeply riven society, divided across several fault lines. Social cohesion is dissolving, giving way to suspicion that grows into paranoia that evolves into hatred expressed in implacable contrarianism. Part of that emerges in conspiracy theories and "rights" movements such as the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.

      Most Americans don't seem troubled by the fact that their country has the world's highest per capita spending on health care and yet terrible health outcomes. America is at the top of the class for Covid deaths. The richest economy in the world has the highest rate and overall numbers of incarceration. Educational standards are falling. Even social mobility, the chance to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, the dream of the self-made man, has collapsed to less than half that of the EU nations. Xenophobia, racism, misogyny and bigotry of all descriptions chokes America's arteries. White supremacy is rampant. Things are said by senators and congressmen today that would not have crossed their lips 10 years ago.

      As civil war loomed, Lincoln, quoting scripture, stood up in Congress and said a nation divided against itself could not stand.

      We're witnessing America writhing in the throes of what could be a violent decline. Hold on to your hat.

      Delete
  2. Northern PoVJanuary 6, 2021 at 6:15 AM

    I believe this is called triage. An ancient concept.

    Here, as always. it is applied in relation to the resources available. (Hint: not enough to go around.)

    .....................

    Where are Sarah Palin's death panels when they need them?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJanuary 6, 2021 at 6:52 AM

      Yes, NPoV, it is triage of a sort. Normally qualified doctors shoulder that responsibility, not ambulance crews. I doubt their pay justifies putting that burden on them.

      That we have to make similar choices is also true. A fellow I knew was on the list for a double lung transplant only he chose to continue smoking so no spare air bags for him.

      In his later years my father got treated rather generously. His doctors evaluated him on a number of factors - he was still able to live on his own, he still drove, he was alert and mentally sound, most of his disabilities were war related, i.e. wounds.

      As for Sarah Palin, thanks for tearing off that scab, NPoV. I think there ought to be a draft. Conscript Sarah and contemporaries such as Michele Bachmann as orderlies to empty bedpans. Give them their own end-of-life purpose.

      Delete
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