<p>[Elderly</a> Woman Dies After Nurse Refuses to Give Her CPR - Yahoo! News](<a href=“http://news.yahoo.com/elderly-woman-dies-nurse-refuses-her-cpr-182307465--abc-news-topstories.html]Elderly”>http://news.yahoo.com/elderly-woman-dies-nurse-refuses-her-cpr-182307465--abc-news-topstories.html)</p>
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<p>Some things in the article that aren’t very clear, but what do you think?</p>
<p>I dont understand why anytype of facility would have a policy against CPR.
Wouldnt that bring more lawsuits instead of fewer?</p>
<p>Was she a DNR?</p>
<p>Well, it isn’t a nursing home, it’s an independent living facility. The staff there are just “babysitters” probably. Still, it seems really, really cruel to have such a policy.
Geez, I’d better check with my mom’s assisted living facility. It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t do CPR if needed. : /</p>
<p>I’m surprised too. I would have assumed that staff would be trained in CPR in such a facility, and other basic things like heimlich. Do they have a policy against using heimlich too?</p>
<p>This reminds me of an incident in Alameda where a man drowned with firefighters and police watching.</p>
<p>It is possible she had a DNR - do not resuscitate signed order?</p>
<p>May be the nurse is afraid of breaking the elderly woman’s ribs. Either way the law suit is coming.</p>
<p>At first I thought here, it’s an Assisted Living facility, not a Nursing Home. AL’s have a culture of maintaining a patient’s autonomy so in normal days, they don’t do simple things you’d expect if it’s against a patient’s will, even for their own health and welfare. For example, if a patient should walk more or needs a shower, AL’s will suggest, recommend, cajole and support. If, however, a patient declines or refuses the assist, AL staff won’t “make” or force a patient to do anything. That becomes the culture of the institution, and it has merits – on normal days.</p>
<p>But to conflate that with not giving CPR, when a 911 dispatcher is on the other end urging that is sheer lunacy to me. CPR as we all know keeps a person oxygenated until the ambulance arrives to take over. This nurse would not even hand the phone over to a “passerby” (quick thinking on the dispatcher to suggest that)! I am no lawyer so I don’t know if a “passerby” is out-of-the-loop of facility policies but it was at least a good idea.</p>
<p>Also since the facility itself called 911, aren’t they obligated to do what 911 asks of them to save a life?</p>
<p>I wonder whether the dispatcher knew of the policy already, so the suggestion to hand the phone to someone nearby had been discussed.</p>
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<p>No, unless the dispatcher is a sworn law enforcement officer. You are under no legal obligation to follow the orders of civilian 911 dispatchers.</p>
<p>^ah ok, thanks for clearing up that one point, cortana431. Much appreciated. I wondered how that all worked.</p>
<p>I am hoping the woman had a DNR and that was why no CPR could be given.</p>
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<p>I didn’t go look it up, but the article wasn’t very clear. It called this place a “senior living center,” an “independent living center” and a “nursing home.”</p>
<p>Regardless, in some states nurses would be required to perform CPR “on duty” and I don’t think facility policy would let them out of that. But then again, in some states what you would expect from a nurse is not what they are required to do. (And that’s not intended to be a shot at nurses!) </p>
<p>Around here, assisted living facilities do not have nurses on staff.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about policies and and legalities. I am not sure that this policy is the best one.
but I do know that we spend of ton of money on end of life care in this country.
Sometimes the most loving, compassionate thing you can do for someone is to let them go.</p>
<p>Also CPR isn’t that successful as a rule. It would maybe just give a slower more expensive lingering death.
At 87 I would hope that I would be allowed to go with some dignity instead of heroic measures taken.</p>
<p>Both of my daughters, while still in their teens, had jobs at summer camps that required them to take CPR training. The idea of which was to give them the skills to actually USE those skills if a situation necessitates it.</p>
<p>At my job, in an elementary school, we have a defibrillator. We receive training on how to use it in the event of a person in cardiac arrest in the building. The idea being to actually prevent a death if we are in the position to help do so.</p>
<p>We are lay people. Why on earth, in any kind of care setting where seniors are housed would the expectations be any less than what we would expect of a trained individual on the street?!</p>
<p>^^^Yes, hops_scout, you’re correct that in the article, the writer calls the facility those three different things, including “Nursing Home.” </p>
<p>In my post, I was responding to their own use of the term “independent living facility” in their own policy language. </p>
<p>Plus some places have several levels of care on the same campus, which can get confusing, too.</p>
<p>Anyway, this article tells a very troubling story, indeed.</p>
<p>I believe California has a Good Samaritan statute but whether it would protect an employee of an assisted living facility or not I do not know. </p>
<p>If CPR is done badly it can have the effect of keeping a person alive but severely brain damaged. Did this employee know CPR?</p>
<p>The practice at this facility is to call 911 & wait. I wonder if that also applies to everyone, not just residents.</p>
<p>I was trained to begin CPR immediately, if they arent breathing, to have someone else call 911, and to continue until you are relieved.</p>
<p>I am not a professional, but I take classes periodically to get recertified.</p>
<p>Two points - </p>
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<li><p>It’s ridiculous that a senior facility, of all places, would have a policy to NOT give CPR to help an individual. This is a different situation than if a person is in a Skilled Nursing Facility with a signed DNR (do not resuscitate) order on file - usually for someone with an end-stage illness. </p></li>
<li><p>How can someone just stand there and watch someone die in front of them and do so because of some ‘policy’ at the place they work? I don’t care about stupid policies - I’d try to help the person anyway even if it means I get fired. It’s downright cold to just stand there and watch the person die when being directed by the 911 dispatcher to give CPR. While it’s not a legal obligation, it’s a moral one.</p></li>
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<p>What this means for any of us reviewing these facilities for family and friends (or even ourselves) is that apparently we now need to ask if their facility has a policy to NOT help dying residents even when there’s not a DNR on file (especially for an ‘independent living facility’ rather than a ‘skilled nursing facility’). The secondary question would be whether the staff is trained in CPR or not. One doesn’t need to be a medically trained person to give basic CPR - they just need the CPR training.</p>
<p>Anyone with a parent in a facility should raise this question with them to find out what they’d do in a similar situation. Who’d have thought such a basic question would need to be asked?</p>
<p>The woman was 87, and so presumably had some quite significant health problems and a sub-par quality of life. People tend to massively overestimate the effectiveness of CPR, presumably because it’s misrepresented on TV (% of people who survive to discharge, even when they collapse in a hospital and CPR is started immediately by doctors is barely into double figures, and even lower in the elderly). In the vast majority of cases, all CPR will do is prolong death in a very undignified and painful way. I don’t know about you, but at that sort of age I’d rather be allowed to slip away peacefully than have my ribs broken in a demonstration of near-certain medical futility. </p>
<p>For that reason, it may simply be that the person at the care facility recognised the nuances of what was happening, and so took a decision that was genuinely in the best interests of the elderly woman.</p>