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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 05 2021, @07:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-it-has-come-to-this dept.

LA Paramedics Told Not To Transport Some Patients With Low Chance Of Survival:

The Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency issued a directive Monday that ambulance crews should only administer bottled oxygen to patients whose oxygen saturation levels fall below 90%.

In a separate memo from the county's EMS Agency, paramedic crews have been told not to transfer patients who experience cardiac arrest unless spontaneous circulation can be restored on the scene.

Both measures announced Monday, which were issued by the agency's medical director, Dr. Marianne Gausche-Hill, were taken in an attempt to get ahead of an expected surge to come following the winter holidays.

Many hospitals in the region "have reached a point of crisis and are having to make very tough decisions about patient care," Dr. Christina Ghaly, the LA County director of health services said at a briefing Monday.

[...] "We do not believe that we are yet seeing the cases that stemmed from the Christmas holiday," Ghaly added. "This, sadly, and the cases from the recent New Year's holiday, is still before us, and hospitals across the region are doing everything they can to prepare."

'We Are Not Abandoning Resuscitation': LA County Healthcare Leader Speaks Out After Memo Raises Concerns:

Los Angeles County hospitals are so inundated, officials said they're just trying to provide the best care they can for the people who need it.

The memo sent out on December 28 by the medical director of L.A. County's Emergency Medical Services agency, Dr. Marianne Gausche-Hill, addressed how first responders should treat stroke and heart attack patients, saying a patient should be treated at the scene first and have a pulse during resuscitation before transporting them to the hospital.

[...] The medical director of L.A. County's Emergency Services Agency, Dr. Marianne Gausche-Hill, assured CBS2 that officials continue to do all they can to save patients' lives at the scene and the hospital, as they always have.

"We are not abandoning resuscitation," Gausche-Hill said. "We are absolutely doing best practice resuscitation and that is do it in the field, do it right away... What we're asking is that — which is slightly different than before — is that we are emphasizing the fact that transporting these patients arrested leads to very poor outcomes.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 06 2021, @09:30PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 06 2021, @09:30PM (#1095818) Journal

    Expand hospitals: where do you think the money for this is going to come from? Hospitals in this country are not owned by the State, they're all privately-owned

    If you're speaking of the US, there are plenty of state-owned hospitals too. And being private or public doesn't magically prepare you for things you don't bother to prepare for. Trillions of public funds have been burned over the past 9 or so months. That seems a good place to start to look for that money.

    Hire more hospital staff: Where exactly do you think these staff are going to come from? Cuba? You can't just grab some person off the street and stick them in a 3-month training program and suddenly have a new ICU doctor or nurse.

    Good idea actually. Yes, grab people off the street (or in other words, accept volunteers), train them for three months, and get something far better than nothing.

    Ventilators and oxygen tanks: Ventilators aren't much good if you don't have an ICU to use them in, which takes us back to point #1. The ventilators don't seem to be that much of a problem anyway, it's everything else. If you've burned out all your doctors and nurses, who's going to operate the ventilators?

    Yet another reason to get that additional staff that you say is impossible to get.

    Again, how, exactly? This is not China: we can't just build state-owned hospitals in 10 days here. This is also not the UK with a nationalized health system. You (Americans) didn't want "socialized medicine", you've voted against it every opportunity you got, so this is what you get. Suck it up and stop whining.

    Actually, the US already did that [usatoday.com].

    The Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies set up a 970-bed care center at the TCF Center, a 350,000-square-foot convention center in Detroit. The installation took nine days, "one of the fastest builds in the country," Michelle Grinnell of Michigan Economic Development told USA TODAY.

    The Detroit center "will receive COVID-19 patients from other southeast Michigan acute care hospitals at least 48 hours after being admitted as an inpatient," Grinnell said. The center won't have an intensive care unit or take patients who need ventilators.

    And if you have ten months to prepare, well, you might not need ten day builds.