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Posted on 03/27/2006 9:08:03 AM PST by NYer
PREMATURE babies requiring expensive hospital care have been described as “bed blockers” by one of the country’s leading medical colleges.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) says that the ability of doctors to keep alive babies born under 25 weeks presents difficulties for the treatment of other infants. Its comments were made in a submission to an inquiry by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics into the ethics of prolonging life in foetuses and the newborn.
The RCOG paper states: “Some weight should be given to economic considerations as there is a real issue in neonatal units of “bed blocking”, whereby women have to be transferred in labour to other units compromising both their and their babies’ care.
“One of the problems of the ‘success’ of neonatal intensive care is that the practitioners are always pushing boundaries. There has been a constant need to expand numbers of cots to cover the increasing tendency to try and rescue babies at lower and lower gestations.”
The college’s paper was submitted in July 2005 but its content has been highlighted as NHS trusts come under growing pressure to cut costs and use resources more efficiently.
The RCOG said last night: “There is a proper professional concern around the high death and handicap rate in babies born under 25 weeks. A wellinformed and considered debate is welcomed.”
Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said yesterday that admitting patients who were unfit for surgery or arrived early for operations was blocking beds and costing the NHS up to £200 a day each.
Some trusts are admitting up to 60 per cent of patients the day before surgery. Ms Hewitt said that if all the trusts with above-average early admissions met the national average it would save at least 390,000 bed days a year at a saving of £78 million.
“Improved patient care and increased efficiency go hand in hand,” she said.
“Finding out a patient is unfit for surgery, which could have been established by a separate assessment before the operation, is another example of a wasted bed day.”
A pilot scheme in Croydon where orthopaedic patients waiting for surgery at Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust visited the hospital for routine pre-surgery tests and administration two weeks before their operationsaved 13 beds and £270,000 in the first year while treating the same number of patients.
Dr Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “Reducing inpatient admissions and lengths of stay in hospitals will result in real savings, but only if capacity is reduced as a result — which may mean closing beds and wards.
“A fixation with hospital buildings is preventing the development of new and imaginative services. We will have to work hard to convince the public that, with technological advances and a shift to providing more care out of hospitals, the loss of beds and wards doesn’t necessarily equate to a decline in services for patients.”
Pretty much we do that here, first go to your family doc for clearance, then over to the hosp on surgery day. Seems reasonable to me.
OTOH...we can, with infinite money, keep preemies alive for a long time. Also we can prolong dying for months in terminal older folk.
Sooner or later we're going to have to talk about it. We don't have infinite money. This is not a socialized medicine issue since hospitals have to perform some sort of effective triage or they'll run out of beds.
News flash:
There is another option.
Increase the newborn wings of your hospitals. You can afford it if you get your head around the concept of Choose Life.
What would these medical types have wanted THEIR mothers to do if they slipped into this world a few weeks / months early?
thanks for posting this. isn't it a shame that a country that could be a world leader in "some" aspects of democratic life can not imagine the importance of saving a baby?
Yep. Damn doctors. Always pushing boundaries.
SD
Father of a preemie (premium!) ping!
Yep. Damn doctors. Always pushing boundaries.
Yeah, don't they know they know that boundaries are there for a reason?
I don't quite know what to say. I cannot believe that it's come to this.
Something like this is pretty much inevitable with socialized medicine.
The greatest irony and tragedy here is that in the next room from where doctors are working to save preemies, other "doctors" are cutting them into pieces.
In the UK abortion can be performed when the babies are larger than the ones the Neonatal Units in the same area are saving. Curious ...
Don't you just love socialized medicine?
Please Freepmail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.
It's only a matter of time before the very young, very old, sick and infirmed, anyone with any sort of medical problem will be seen as an "economoic burden".
Anyone who thinks Satan does not exist, please take note.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
Euthanasia
2276 Those whose lives are diminished or weakened deserve special respect. Sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible.
2277 Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.
Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.
2278 Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of "over-zealous" treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one's inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.
2279 Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged.
<< NYer
Devil in the flesh
These AH's are lower than reptile crap >>
To put it mildly.
Sodom and Gomorrah are alive and well and comprise only a tiny corner of the Europeons' increasingly evil empire.
And, to borrow from the evangelicals, judgement, it seems, is at hand.
Even once-great -- or so some say -- Britain's national birth rate, most of it in any case propelled by the much higher rate of reproduction of its many third world Blair-Cli'ton/NATO Neo-Axis empowered and fellow Hitler-footsteps-following Euro-peon Muslim immigrants, has, thank God, declined far below the rate at which the British can survive as a people.
As have the birth rates of so many of the rest of the dead and decadent states that make up the Brussels-based Europeon Neo-Soviet, of which said once-great Britain has become but a squalidly socialistic offshore satellite state.
Meanwhile, at least one of Britain's Europeon partner dead and decadent states has elevated the killing, by "doctors," of the inconvenient of any age, to the level a "medical procedure." And its every parner state has long kept seriously premature babies off its lists of what constitutes "live infants." In order, one supposes to maintain "infant mortality rates" that "look better," in their eyes, than America's.
And to reach the point they're all now already at. Or are rapidly approaching.
BUMPping
Our foster child was born at 24 weeks' gestation as well.
She turns 2 in two weeks, and is happy and healthy with no long-term effects (photos on my freeper-page).
Had she been born in a different location, she'd be termed "unviable" by the Culture of Death.
Your son's life is nothing short of miraculos! Thank you for sharing his beautiful pictures!
I told one of them this. They were horribly shocked. Accused me of being heartless and threatening them. I did not say it in a threatening mode at all, just a suggestion. Told them that people who wanted others to die because they were worried about world population should be the first to volunteer or else they were hypocrites.
YOur little Faith is beautiful and a miracle!
I am so thankful that she found you for a foster family (and hopefully forever-family!)
Little Logan is amazing and wonderful and also a MIRACLE!
But, he is not mine!
He is Freeper "Brad'sGramma's" dear friend's grandson.
Brad's Gramma started the thread I posted above soon after Logan (aka "the Texas Termite") was born~
The thread is amazing...way over 10,000 replies!
He barely bade it through a couple of times..and we were all on our knees...but he is alive and well today..and his Nana posts under his FReeper name "Texas Termite".
Thanks for the nice comments!
Good luck with your beautiful family!
And GOD BLESS!
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