Paramedics face hard choices at nursing homes
By Randi Belisomo (Reuters Health) – Too often, when an ambulance is called to a nursing home, the resident’s wishes regarding end-of-life care aren’t clear and the staff have differing opinions, leaving paramedics to navigate through the confusion, a new paper suggests. “For a patient nearing the end of his or her life, transfer from a nursing home to the emergency department can be inappropriate, with potentially negative consequences, but transfer in these circumstances is, regrettably, all too common,” UK researchers write in the Emergency Medical Journal. “People are trained to call emergency services, we learn as children to call 911,” said Nancy Berlinger of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York.
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