Ventilator Rationing, Universal DNRs and Covid 19 (Coronavirus)

This article was published by Nancy Valko on April 3, 2020

By Nancy Valko RN

As a nurse myself, it is hard to watch my fellow nurses bravely fighting on the front lines of this pandemic without being able to be there with them.

Nurses are a special breed. In my over 50 years as a nurse, I found that most of us chose nursing because we want to help people and alleviate suffering. We work the long hours on our feet, skip meals, hold hands and listen, cry when our patients die, etc. because we truly do care.

But the health care system has been changing. A dark new ethics movement is infecting our system and telling us not only that our patients have a right to choose to end their lives but also that some of our patients even “need” to die and that we can’t care for all of them during the Covid 19 pandemic.

Worst of all, we are being told that we can now know how to decide which patients are “expendable”.

Ventilator Rationing
A 71 year old man with a heart condition arrives at a hospital is diagnosed with Covid 19. His condition worsens and he is placed on a ventilator to help him breathe. Then the infection rate spikes in the city and the hospital is overrun with severely ill patients, many between 20 and 50 years old and otherwise healthy.

The health care team is forced to decide which patients should they focus on and care for.

This is the scenario posed in a March 20, 2020 Medpage article “Ethics Consult: Take Elderly COVID-19 Patient Off Ventilator?— You make the call” along with an online survey with 3 questions:

1. Would you prioritize the care of healthier and younger patients and shift the ventilator from the elderly man to patients with a higher probability of recovering? 
2. Would you change your decision if the elderly patient had been in intensive care for a non-COVID-19-related illness? 
3. Would you prioritize the older man over college students who had likely been infected during spring break trips?
   

After almost 4000 votes, the survey showed 55.65% voting yes on prioritizing the care of the healthier and younger patients, 78.11% voting no on changing their decision about the elderly patient if he didn’t have Covid 19 and 71.12% voting no on prioritizing the elderly man over college students likely to have been infected on a spring break trip.

So while most people fear becoming infected with Covid 19, less well-known ethical dangers may also affect us, especially those of us who are older or debilitated.

Every day, we hear about the shortage of ventilators needed for Covid 19 patients and the overworked and understaffed health care professionals providing the care. Now both mainstream media and medical journals are publishing articles about the ethical dilemma of denying CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) or a ventilator to older patients or those with a poor prognosis with Covid 19 in a triage situation.

Triage is defined as “A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated.” (Emphasis added)

But this definition does NOT include deciding how to triage people based on age or “productivity”.

Universal DNRs

A March 25, 2020 Washington Post article “A Framework for Rationing Ventilators and Critical Care Beds During the COVID-19 Pandemic” posed the question: “how to weigh the ‘save at all costs’ approach to resuscitating a dying patient against the real danger of exposing doctors and nurses to the contagion of coronavirus.”

This is not just an academic discussion.

As the article reveals, “Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago has been discussing a do-not-resuscitate policy for infected patients, regardless of the wishes of the patient or their family members — a wrenching decision to prioritize the lives of the many over the one.” (Emphasis added) And Lewis Kaplan, president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and a University of Pennsylvania surgeon, described how colleagues at different institutions are sharing draft policies to address their changed reality.

Bioethicist Scott Halpern at the University of Pennsylvania is cited as the author of one widely circulated model guideline being considered by many hospitals. In an interview, he said a universal DNR for Covid 19 patients was too “draconian” and could sacrifice a young person in otherwise good health. He also noted that the reality of health-care workers with limited protective equipment cannot be ignored. “If we risk their well-being in service of one patient, we detract from the care of future patients, which is unfair,” he said.

The article notes that “Halpern’s document calls for two physicians, the one directly taking care of a patient and one who is not, to sign off on do-not-resuscitate orders. They must document the reason for the decision, and the family must be informed but does not have to agree.” (Emphasis added)

This could not only upend traditional ethics but also the law as “Health-care providers are bound by oath — and in some states, by law — to do everything they can within the bounds of modern technology to save a patient’s life, absent an order, such as a DNR, to do otherwise.”

Both disability and pro-life groups have condemned such health care rationing with Covid 19, especially for older people and people with disabilities.

However, this and more is apparently already happening.

In an April 1, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “What the Nurses See: Bronx Hospital Reels as Coronavirus Swamps New York” a co-worker told the nurse interviewed that the nurses were no longer doing chest compressions to resuscitate Covid 19 patients because “it uses lots of protective gear and puts workers at greater risk than chemical resuscitations”. This was corroborated by other nurses who said this has become an “unspoken rule.”

Conclusion

How can we protect ourselves and our loved ones in these circumstances?

At the very least and whether or not we are older or have disabilities, we should consider or reconsider our advance directives.

As the Life Legal Defence Foundation writes in their “SPECIAL MESSAGE ABOUT COVID-19 AND ADVANCE HEALTH CARE DIRECTIVES”:

As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, the public is learning about the importance of mechanical ventilators in providing temporary breathing support for many of those infected. Ventilators are saving lives!

A false understanding of respirators and ventilators has become commonplace in recent years. Many people think that these and similar machines’ only role is prolonging the dying process. The widely publicized treatment of COVID-19 patients is helping to dispel that myth. Many patients rely on machines temporarily every day for any number of reasons and go on to make full recoveries.

Unfortunately, many individuals have completed advance health care directives stating or suggesting that they do not wish to receive breathing assistance through mechanical ventilation.

Please take the time to review any advanced medical directives (including POLST forms) signed by you or your loved ones to make sure they are clear that mechanical ventilation is not among the forms of care that are refused. If there is any ambiguity, you may want to consider writing, signing, and dating an addendum specifying that mechanical ventilation is authorized. (Emphasis in original)

I would add that other treatments or care such as DNRs and feeding tubes also not be automatically checked off. I believe it is safer to appoint a trusted person to insist on being given all information concerning risks and benefit before permission is given to withdraw or withhold treatment.

Even as the nation is racing to get more ventilators and staff as we cope with this terrible pandemic, we all must continue to affirm the value of EVERY human life.

Euthanasia: Canada, Conscience and Coercion.

This article was published by Nancy Valko on her blog on February 18, 2020

Nancy Valko

By Nancy Valko

A January 22, 2020 CNA article titled “Perform Euthanasia or Lose Government Funding”, Canadian Hospice Told” revealed that a secular Canadian hospice was at risk of losing its government funding over its refusal to euthanize patients who request an “assisted death.”

How could this happen?

First of all, Canadian health care (known to Canadians as “medicare”) is 69% publicly funded for “medically necessary” care administered by the 13 provinces and territories with different rules. 31% of Canadian health care costs are paid by the private sector for services not covered or only partially covered by medicare, such as prescription drugs, dentistry and optometry.

The problems started when the Canadian Supreme Court legalized MAiD (Medical Assitance in Dying” in 2015.

Soon after, the province of Quebec drew up guidelines for MAiD and made “euthanasia kits” for lethal injections available to every doctor in Quebec. Most MAiD deaths in Canada are done by lethal injection.

In September 2016, about three months after euthanasia became legal in Canada, British Columbia's Fraser Health introduced a new policy which required all hospices receiving more than 50% of provincial funding for their beds to offer euthanasia to their residents. However, the hospice, in question, is operated by the non-profit organization the Delta Hospice Society, which is opposed to Canada’s MAiD

One doctor said that there are “‘strong lobbies’ backing this new effort to expand MAiD into additional institutions which receive provincial funding, including faith-based hospitals or hospices.” (Emphasis added)

How One Catholic Health Care Facility Responded To MAiD

Unfortunately in 2018, the Catholic Covenant Health system in the province of Alberta, Canada released a revised MAID policy:

“after consultations with more than 100 individuals and groups including doctors, Catholic bishops, Alberta Health Services, the Alberta government, patient advisers, families, ethicists and community members. 

Under the policy, witnessing and signing of legal documents and assessments of eligibility can take place on Covenant Health sites. Patients deemed eligible for MAID would still be transferred to other facilities.” (Emphasis added)

A current check of the Covenant website on MAiD shows no change in policy.

The Canadian “Slippery Slope” Continues

In January, 2020 the Halifax Group, published “MAiD Legislation at a Crossroads: Persons with Mental Disorders as Their Sole Underlying Medical Condition” that supported MAiD not only for non-dying persons ” experiencing enduring, intolerable and irremediable suffering from physical conditions” but also for persons who have “a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition.” (Emphasis added)

This month, The Expert Advisory Group responded to the Halifax group, warning that the Canadian medical suicide law is the “most permissive in the world”.

The Effect of MAiD on Doctors and Nurses

Last year, The Canadian Catholic Nurses joined the National Association of Catholic Nurses in opposing the American Nurses Association’s draft position for neutrality on physician-assisted suicide (unfortunately later approved) and gave a chilling look at what may be our future if legalized assisted suicide is not opposed:

“Our association formed in 2018 primarily in response to Canadian nurses’ moral distress regarding the nation-wide legalization of medically induced death.

Professional associations and licensing bodies across Canada endorsed the legal changes, requiring conscientious objectors to participate in “Medical Assistance in Dying” by “effective referral” to facilitate access at the patient’s request. Faith-based health care facilities are pressured to participate. Nurse practitioners are trained and qualified to prescribe and administer lethal doses of medication to patients that they or others deem eligible for euthanasia.”

and

The Canadian experience with assisted suicide and euthanasia provides evidence for your continued resistance to the practice.

Unlike Oregon, Canada has not experienced a growth in palliative care along with the rapid expansion of induced death. Instead, we experience ongoing demands for access to lethal injections for new categories of patients, including “mature minors;” those who write advanced directives; and those whose mental illness is the sole condition underlying their request.”

A 2018 study “Medical assistance in dying (MAiD): Canadian nurses’ experiences” stated that:

“It is vital to understand how MAiD is influencing nurses in the Canadian context to ensure a smooth transition of this end‐of‐life care option across settings and communities. ” (Emphasis added)

The study acknowledges some nurses’ “moral distress” but describes “how participating in, or declining to participate in MAiD is shaping the participants’ perceptions of nursing as a profession“. The authors suggest promoting concepts like “Providing holistic care without judgment, Advocating choice, Supporting a good death” to positively reinforce that MAiD was “not a significant departure from their professional goals”. (Emphasis added)

(Ironically, 77% doctors in Laval, Canada refused to provide MAiD 18 months after legalization with the most common reason that MAiD was “too much of an emotional burden to bear”.)

Conclusion

Last year it was reported that “More than one in every 100 deaths in Canada is administered by a doctor“ but that even this number is likely higher because parts of Canada currently do not report such deaths.

The numbers are also likely to get higher as the Canadian euthanasia laws expand the eligibility criteria and health care professionals worry about losing their jobs if they refuse to participate.

Unfortunately, most of the US mainstream media ignores the Canadian euthanasia experience while approvingly reporting on the increasing number of US states legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

What all of us need to understand is that the legalized killing of any patient ultimately leads to the destruction not only of the patient but also of a trustworthy health care system and a truly safe and civilized society.

Lethal Problems with Medical Futility and Disability Bias

This article was published by Nancy Valko on January 15, 2020.

Nancy Valko

By Nancy Valko

In 2018, Chris Dunn survived a freak diving accident that left him paralyzed, mostly blind and on a ventilator to breathe. He spent most of the next year in an ICU in rural Maine.

Unable to see, eat, breathe or move on his own, the 44 year old father and concrete work spent his days in bed listening to the History Channel and hoping for a chance to show he could do more.

Efforts to find a rehab center failed. Even worse, hospital administrators and others were encouraging Chris’s mother Carol to put him in hospice to die. As the article states:

“Drugged up and confined to bed, Chris waited while dealing with a hospital staff that didn’t know what to do with him. ‘There would be nurses that would come in and tell me, ‘You know you’re making your son suffer,’ says Carol. ‘I mean, what’s a mother to do with that?’” (Emphasis added)

However, Carol refused to give up trying to find help for Chris and after 7 months, finally contacted the United Spinal Association. Jane Wierbicky, a longtime nurse and a member of the Association’s Resource Center team worked to help find a rehab center in Atlanta.

Now Chris only uses the ventilator a few hours a night, got outdoors to catch a fish, and returned home to spend Thanksgiving with his mother and girlfriend.

With the help of his mother and a team of advocates, Chris hopes to eventually live in an accessible apartment.

Medical care for Chris was not futile.

Medical Futility

The National Council on Disability defines “medical futility” as

“an ethically, medically, and legally divisive concept concerning whether and when a healthcare provider has the authority to refuse to provide medical care that they deem ‘futile’ or ‘nonbeneficial’. A “medical futility decision” is a decision to withhold or withdraw medical care deemed “futile” or “nonbeneficial.” (Emphasis added)

Because of my professional and personal experiences with disability bias as well as my volunteer work with people with disabilities, I have seen firsthand the potentially lethal effects of medical futility decisions based on disability. I have been writing on this topic for years, most recently on Missouri’s Simon’s Law enacted after the parents of a baby with Trisomy 18 and a heart defect who died later found out that doctors had ordered a “Do Not Resuscitate” and withheld life-sustaining treatment without their knowledge due to a secret medical futility policy at the Catholic hospital treating their son.

Recently, I found out that the National Council on Disability just published a 82 page comprehensive report titled “Medical Futility and Disability “ as part of a five-report series on the intersection of disability and bioethics.

In a letter to President Trump, the Council chairman states that the series:

“focuses on how the historical and continued devaluation of the lives of people with disabilities by the medical community, legislators, researchers, and even health economists, perpetuates unequal access to medical care, including life-saving care.

and notes that:

“In recent years, there has been a push to regulate medical futility decisions on the state and institutional levels. State laws, which vary greatly in their content and approach, define the protections, or lack thereof, of a patient’s wishes to receive life-sustaining treatment. Hospitals have turned to process based approaches, utilizing internal ethics committees to arbitrate medical futility disputes. Despite the increased attention, however, disability bias still finds its way into futility decision making.” (All emphasis added)

The Council identifies four factors that are influencing the futility debate today: “Advanced life-saving medical technology, Changes in healthcare reimbursement, Evolving concepts of patient autonomy and the Rise of the right-to-die movement”.

The report also extensively explores the legal issues and several court decisions involving medical futility like the Terri Schiavo and Haleigh Poutre cases.

State Laws

The Council report also evaluated current state laws regarding medical futility decisions and found only 11 with strong patient protections, 19 without patient protections, 19 with weak patient protections, and 2 with time-limited patient protections.

Further complicating the state laws is the lack of transparency for patients or other family members regarding an institution’s medical futility policies. Hospitals are rarely transparent with their medical futility policies, as in the Simon’s Law case. The report is right when it states that “the disclosure of medical futility policies is essential to providing patients, their surrogates, and their families with the information they need to protect their rights and ensure accountability”.

The Council also notes that “Disability nondiscrimination laws, including the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, provide a viable, yet largely unexplored vehicle for enforcing the rights of people with disabilities in the medical futility context.”

The report ends with recommendations for Congress, the executive branch, medical and health professional schools, professional accreditation bodies, healthcare insurers and state legislatures to combat the problem of disability bias in healthcare.

Conclusion

One of the reasons I chose to become a nurse decades ago was the strong ethical principles in medicine. We were educated to treat all patients to the best of our ability regardless of race, disability, socioeconomic status, etc. “Quality of life” was something to improve, not judge. The traditional hospice philosophy was to neither hasten nor prolong dying.

But over time, I saw ethics change. As the report itself notes, the advances in technology, changes in health care reimbursement, evolving concepts of patient autonomy and the rise of the right-to-die movement led to radical changes in both law and medical ethics.

The concept of medical futility was no longer limited to medically certain circumstances of treatment ineffectiveness but, all too often, also to the patient’s (and sometimes the family’s) perceived “quality of life”.

Such disability bias is often unrecognized, even by the medical professionals caring for the person, but it is a real bias that must be eliminated in our society.

I admire people like Chris Dunn and his determined mother who show us the possibilities when people with even severe disabilities get a chance to have the best life possible.

Marketing Death and Alzheimer’s Disease

This article was written and published by Nancy Valko on August 9, 2019.

Nancy Valko

By Nancy Valko

An April, 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Attitudes Toward Physician-Assisted Death From Individuals Who Learn They Have an Alzheimer Disease Biomarker” found that approximately 20% of cognitively normal older adults who had elevated beta-amyloid — a biomarker that is thought to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease — said they would consider physician-assisted suicide if they experienced a cognitive decline. Not everyone with amyloid plaques goes on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Although no state with legalized physician-assisted suicide currently allows lethal overdoses for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementia, Emily Largent, JD, PhD, RN (one of the authors of the study) said that:

“Our research helps gauge interest in aid-in-dying among a population at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease dementia and grappling with what they want the end of life to look like”

And

“Public support for aid-in-dying is growing…Now, we are seeing debates about whether to expand access to aid-in-dying to new populations who aren’t eligible under current laws. That includes people with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.”

Choosing Death

As the US birth rate declines to a 32-year low while people are living longer, now there are more people older than 65 than younger than 5. This has major economic and cultural implications, especially with diseases such Alzheimer’s that usually affect older people.

Back in 2012, I wrote about a Nursing Economic$ Summit “How Can We Afford to Die?” that had an 8 point action plan. One of the points discussed the importance of getting everyone over the age of 18 to sign “living wills” and other advance directives that also included the caveat: “if many patients have advance directives that make positive, cost-conscious systemic change impossible, most of the other efforts discussed as part of our action plan will go for naught”. (Emphasis added).

It should not be a surprise that the latest Oregon physician-assisted suicide report shows that 79.2% of those people dying by assisted suicide were age 65 or older and most reported concerns such as “loss of autonomy” and “burden on family, friends/caregivers”.

With Alzheimer’s disease routinely portrayed as the worst case scenario at the end of life for a person (and their family), there are now programs to “help” people plan their own end of life care.

Such programs include Death Cafes where “people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death” and the Conversation Project that is “dedicated to helping people talk about their wishes for end-of-life care”. The Conversation Project was co-founded by journalist Ellen Goodman after years of caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s.

Compassion and Choices (the former Hemlock Society) is the largest and best funded organization working for decades to change laws and attitudes about assisted suicide and other deliberate death options. Compassion and Choices now has a contract rider for people in assisted living facilities that:

“will respect Resident’s end-of-life choices and will not delay, interfere with nor impede any lawful option of treatment or nontreatment freely chosen by Resident or Resident’s authorized healthcare proxy or similar representative, including any of the following end-of-life options” which include:

“Forgoing or directing the withdrawal of life-prolonging treatments

Aggressive pain and/or symptom management, including palliative sedation,

Voluntary refusal of food and fluids with palliative care if needed.

Any other option not specifically prohibited by the law of the state in which Facility is located.” (Emphasis added)

Conclusion

I have both a professional and personal interest in Alzheimer’s disease.

Having taken care of a mother with Alzheimer’s until her death, I treasure many of the moments I had with her. It is possible to both begin the eventual mourning and still appreciate the special moments that indeed do come. My mom was a very high-strung woman who constantly worried about everything. The Alzheimer’s calmed her down somewhat and especially blunted her anxiety about the presence of a tracheotomy for her thyroid cancer.

One of my favorite memories is sitting on a couch with my mom on one side and my then 2 year-old daughter on the other. Sesame Street was on and I noticed that both Mom and my daughter had exactly the same expression of delight while watching the show. A friend thought that was sad but I found it both sweet and profound that their mental capacities had intersected: One in decline, one in ascension. Perception is everything.

Also, I often took care of Alzheimer’s patients as a nurse and I enjoyed these patients while most of my colleagues just groaned. Even though such patients can be difficult at times, I found that there is usually a funny, sweet person in there who must be cared for with patience and sensitivity. I found taking care of people with Alzheimer’s very rewarding.

And although I might be at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease myself because of my mother, I won’t be taking a test for biomarkers to try to predict the future.

Instead, I will spend my time living the best life I can and hopefully helping others. I believe that life is too precious to spend time worrying about things that might happen.

Assisted Suicide and “Failure of Unconsciousness”

This article was published by Nancy Valko on April 18, 2019

By Nancy Valko

As a nurse, I have seen patients assumed to be unconscious while in a coma or sedated on a ventilator later tell me about some memories and feelings during that time. This is why I always cared for such patients as if they were awake.

Now in a stunning February, 2019 Association of Anaesthetists article titled: “Legal and ethical implications of defining an optimum means of achieving unconsciousness in assisted dying”, a group of international doctors explore the difficulty in ensuring unconsciousness to death in lethal injection capital punishment and assisted suicide/euthanasia. (Note: Since the authors are international, some quoted terms here are spelled differently than here in the US)

• Assisted dying can cause inhumane deaths.
• Is lethal injection inhumane?
• Many assisted suicide deaths are slow and painful.

Believing that “A decision by a society to sanction assisted dying in any form should logically go hand‐in‐hand with defining the acceptable method(s)”, the authors reviewed the methods commonly used and contrast these with an analysis of capital punishment in the US. They “expected that, since a common humane aim is to achieve unconsciousness at the point of death, which then occurs rapidly without pain or distress, there might be a single technique being used.”

They were wrong.

They found that with self-administered lethal overdoses “with death resulting slowly from asphyxia due to cardiorespiratory (heartbeat and breathing) depression”, helium self-suffocation and the Dutch lethal injection that resembles US capital punishment, “there appears to be a relatively high incidence of vomiting (up to 10%), prolongation of death (up to 7 days), and re‐awakening from coma (up to 4%), constituting failure of unconsciousness.” (Emphasis added)