Tag: Death and Dying

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Hospital Safety 101: Didn't Mom Teach You to Wash Your Hands?

by Fran Johns

San Francisco Chronicle Washington Bureau writer Carolyn Lochhead reported today on a new idea somebody had about making hospitals safer: get folks to wash their hands. Hello?

The president of a leading medical standards organization announced a new program Thursday that is designed to improve health care safety practices, starting with a rigorous approach toward hand-washing by hospital staffers.

And this is serious business.

Hand-washing failures contribute to infections linked to health care that kill almost 100,000 Americans a year and cost U.S. hospitals $4 billion to $29 billion a year to combat, said Dr. Mark Chassin, who leads the Joint Commission, which sets standards and accredits hospitals and health care organizations.

Chassin’s announcement came after Hearst Newspapers published the results of an investigation, “Dead by Mistake,” which reported that 247 people die every day in the United States from infections contracted in hospitals.

Anyone who has ever come home from surgery with an infection, or more specifically anyone whose spouse has come home from surgery with an infection (nasty-wound-tending not having been fully explained in those for-better-or-for-worse lines) will applaud the new program, but it’s hard not to wonder what has taken the medical profession so long. Hospitals have found, Lochhead reports, that “caregivers washed their hands less than 50 percent of the time when they should.”

If there’s ever been a good example of potential savings to pay for universal health care, this is one to top the list. Consumers, we who would do well to wash our own hands when visiting or inhabiting hospitals, owe a debt of gratitude to the Joint Commission (and to Hearst Newspapers for the excellent ‘Dead by Mistake’ series.)

Maybe more sinks will be adorned with the sign that gave my husband and me a healthy chuckle during a recent visit to the Kaiser emergency room:

“Hand-wash unto others” it read, “as you would have them hand-wash unto you.”


Hospitals urged to strictly enforce hand-washing.

General interest
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A Life-or-Death Decision in Australia

by Fran Johns

Australian Chief Justice Wayne Martin ruled Friday that quadriplegic Christian Rossiter has the right to end his life, if he chooses, by starving himself to death. Of all difficult medical-ethical issues, this has to be close to the top. I do not applaud the decision, do not support suicide (though I strongly support the right of a mentally competent, terminally ill adult to hasten his or her own dying) and hope Mr. Rossiter changes his mind. He may well do so now.

A series of injuries combined to make the 49-year-old a spastic quadriplegic last year. Mr Rossiter, once a keen rock climber and adventurer, told the Supreme Court his life was once exciting and enjoyable.

But the reality of his situation is far from that now.

Unable to move other than wiggle one finger or toe, unable to take nourishment except through a feeding tube, Mr. Rossiter asked his caretakers, Brightwater Care Group, dozens of times to remove that tube. They went to the court for an answer, and the answer has now come. But Mr. Rossiter is talking to his doctors and says he may change his mind. Should he stick with the decision to remove the feeding tube he will not, in truth, be “committing suicide;” he will be allowing natural death. (In the U.S. he would qualify for hospice care.) Either way, the choice should be his.

There are no winners or losers in this tragic tale. But there is something heroic in one man’s determination to keep control of his own destiny. I admire his gumption, and wish him well.

Quadriplegic Christian Rossiter now has control of destiny | PerthNow.

General interest/Health/Politics & Causes
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Looking at one's own end-of-life issues

by Fran Johns

A tough story eloquently told by California physician Martin Welsh adds poignancy to the fight for legalized physician aid in dying, and emphasis to the need for patient choice as a consideration in health reform. Dr. Welsh speaks in clear language of his current dilemma:

I am a 55-year-old retired family doctor with a large, loving family and innumerable friends and former patients whom I see often. I am an extraordinarily lucky man.

For the last five years, I have also been a patient. I have ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a cruel neurological illness in which a normally functioning intellect becomes trapped in an increasingly weak and eventually paralyzed body. Soon, I will die from it.

Through my career, I tried to honor my patients’ end-of-life wishes. But after a quarter-century as a firsthand witness to death, I’ve developed my own perspective.

It’s not that I’m a quitter. I have struggled against adversity of one sort or another all my life, and those challenges have helped prepare me for what I face now. I still delight in accomplishing difficult things, and I always wear a bright red ALS wristband that says “Never Give Up.”

That said, there will come a limit. I have made it very clear to my wife, my family and my doctors that I want no therapy that will prolong my suffering and lengthen the burden on others. I do not want a feeding tube nor a tracheotomy when the time comes that I can no longer eat, drink or breathe for myself.

Dr. Welsh suggests, for himself and others, making a list of 100 things that make life worth living, ordinary things one does every day.

Some are routine, some are “chores,” some are pleasurable. Get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. Kiss your wife. Answer the phone.

Drive your car to work. Go play golf with your friends. Brush your teeth. Write a letter, lick and seal the envelope closed and put a stamp on it. Hug your child.

Of course we do many more than 100 things each day, but for now, just imagine 100 that are essential to the life you live. Now if you take away one, you can still do 99. Is life worth living without being able to smell the rose in the garden? Of course it is! How about losing two or seven, or 23 — is life still worth living? Of course.

But suppose you get to where you’ve lost, say, 90 things, and now with each thing taken away, a bad thing is added…

At some point, no matter who you are or how strong, you can lose enough things that matter — and acquire enough negatives — that the burdens will outweigh the joys of being alive…

Recognizing he’ll reach that point one day, Dr. Welsh looks his destiny squarely in the eye:

…as I face my diminishing list of the 100 things that make life worth living, the choice of quality over quantity has to be mine to make.

General interest
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A Novel Idea for Healthcare Reform

by Fran Johns

Not long ago I attended an event at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, featuring a speech by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer. Dr. Romer’s talk, “The Great Credit Freeze and the U.S. Economy,” was all about improving healthcare while slowing down the growth of its cost. We know we can’t reduce costs, she said; what we hope to do is reduce the rate of increase. And one way to contain healthcare costs might be to find out what the patient wants. Imagine.

This observation was not in direct response to a question, but could well have been. Dr. Romer was asked, by more than one audience member, about how to address excessive expenditures at the beginning and end of life. A grossly disproportionate share of costs, she conceded, “are spent on the last six months of life. And one thing we’re not doing enough of is letting patients express what they want.”

If the issue were not so grim and sorrowful it would call for a “Well, duh.”

It would be hard to find many people saying they’d like their last few days on this planet to be spent semi-conscious or in pain and distress, hooked up to a tangle of wires and tubes in a blue-lit hospital room (see Scott Bowen’s post 7/14.) But this is in fact the system we have created: we focus on prolongation of life without regard to quality, we aid and abet doctors who equate death with failure, we never talk about our own mortality as if in silence we can become immortal. Most of us would choose to die at home, properly medicated for pain and surrounded by our loved ones; most of us will die in an institution

Audience members had a wide assortment of questions, and Dr. Romer had plenty more to say. But finding out what the patient wants, and acting accordingly, is surely one excellent path towards better care – and even contained cost growth — and everyone in America could begin that process today.

It is an easy solution, even if only a small, partial solution, to this piece of the muddled medi-puzzle of our healthcare system: talk. Tell your doctors, caregivers, loved ones what you do or don’t want. Write it down. Use the forms universally available (Advance Directives, POLST, others.) You might even wind up with what you actually want in your final days. Christina Romer is on your side.

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