NHS too quick to resuscitate acutely ill people

Posted 05/06/2012

The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death reviewed the care given to 585 acutely ill patients who ended up having a cardiac arrest.It was noted that some of the most frail elderly patients are suffering “distressing” deaths because hospitals wrongly try to resuscitate them a watchdog says. The watchdog concluded that cardiopulmonary resuscitation had wrongly become the default setting and a third of cardiac arrests could have been prevented. The report concluded that assessing if resuscitation was necessary should become standard.The review looked at patients with an average age of 77 and the standard of care given to these patients. It found that staff were not properly assessing their conditions and were failing to spot the warning signs of an impending cardiac arrest. Details of whether or not to give CPR was recorded only for 122 patients. Of these, 52 cases had resuscitation performed when they had explicitly said that they did not want it.The experts said performing CPR in inappropriate cases led to an inappropriate and distressing death. They gave an example of an elderly patient with dementia who was given CPR for 10 minutes until a senior doctor stopped the team. The report said resuscitation should not have taken place.Julie Crossley a medical injury lawyer at Ashtons Legal, comments: “It is a difficult decision and clearly there would be criticism from some family members if attempts were not made at resuscitation, but there comes a point when more harm than good is achieved. It is especially difficult if the patient has clearly agreed that they do not want resuscitating and this request is ignored.”