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YOUR INTENSIVE CARE HOTLINE - Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: The ICU Team is Pushing the DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) and End of Life Narrative. They have No Respect for our Wishes!

/ Patrik Hutzel - Critical Care Nurse Consultant / No Comments

Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: The ICU Team is Pushing the DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) and End of Life Narrative. They have No Respect for our Wishes!

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Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.

So, one of our readers shared a frustration this week where they say, “The ICU is pushing the DNR and the end-of-life narrative and has no respect for our wishes as a family.” And obviously, this is something we encounter all the time with our clients and readers. And it’s something that I encountered when I was still working in ICU. I have worked in ICU for over 20 years in three different countries, where I also worked as a nurse unit manager for over five years. And it’s certainly left me to be critical of the system because if someone doesn’t want a DNR, if someone doesn’t want to die, then I believe it’s the duty of doctors, nurses, and intensive care units to do everything that a patient and the family wants. And we see it all the time this narrative being pushed that it’s “in the best interest” of a patient to die if they don’t want to. I have yet to find out why health professionals would go against that. That’s not moral, it’s not ethical.

And the way to deal with it is simply to challenge it and with services like Intensive Care at Home now, patients can live at home much longer. The ICU bed can be emptied anyway with services like Intensive Care at Home. I understand how ICUs operate and they have to manage beds, they have to manage staff, they have to manage equipment, and that’s why they create the pressure for families to sign DNRs and create that end-of-life narrative that it’s “in the best interest” of a patient to die because they won’t have any “quality of life”.

What is quality of life? It’s very subjective. It’s very subjective for every individual. What might be an acceptable quality of life for you might not be acceptable for me or vice versa. And many patients can have quality of life at home with services like Intensive Care at Home where they can leave ICU even if they’re ventilated with a tracheostomy. And good for you to stand your ground that you’ve seen through the ICU narrative and that you’re questioning it and challenging it all the way. And we are here to help and support you with this all the way along.

So, that is my quick tip for today.

Don’t let ICU create the narrative, you can create your own narrative. You’ve got all the information at your feet here at intensivecarehotline.com. We have strategies here, proven strategies to help you. You just need to get on early. Many families come to us when it’s too late. You got to do research from day one when you have loved one in intensive care. Otherwise, you will be fighting an uphill battle. And the ICU has time to create that narrative. You got to create your own story from day one. And again, we are here to help you all the way along.

That means if you have a loved one in intensive care, go to intensivecarehotline.com and call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or simply send us an email to [email protected].

Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. There, you have access to me and my team, 24 hours a day, in a membership area and via email, and we answer all questions, intensive care and Intensive Care at Home related.

If you need a medical record review, please contact us as well. We review medical records for our clients in ICU in real time, but also after ICU. But it’s best if we can review them in real time so we can give you almost like a second opinion, and we can help you interpret clinical data in real time.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care and Intensive Care at Home, click the notification bell, click the like button, share the video with your friends and families, and click and comment below whether you agree or disagree, tell me what you think and let me know what you want to see next and what questions do you have.

Thanks for watching.

This is Patrik Hutzel to intensivecarehotline.com and I’ll talk to you in a few days.

 

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