How do you feel that senior nurses?

i have just read on yahoo news that senior nurses will be allowed to choose if they resuscitate patients or not

Bring back matron she would know the patients and their wishes.My nan at 82 was resuscitated she layed on her bed and had gone naturally after that it was the worse fortnight of her life she spent most of it in hospital hallucinating not knowing who we were.I'm sure that a senior nurse would not have brought her back.

Just more pressure on their heads

You've had it if they have had a bad day in work. It's more pressure on them and they could make a bad decision

No change. Nurses have been killing people with neglect for years.

terrible! to make a decision weather to save a life or not Mmmmmmmmm ..... what if the nurse is racist? and has to make a choice of saving or not saving a "foreigner" this is all wrong, there are so many different scenarios to name .what would Florence nightingale think?ALL nurses should use there skills to help the unwell.....is this not why they became one in the first place?

It's being reported strangely, at the moment, only a doctor can make the decision TO resuscitate, the move is to give the senior nurses the right to decide TO resuscitate, not whether to resuscitate or not. So, if you're lying choking, the nurse can get on with reviving you, as opposed to shouting for a doctor first......

BUT, it's more dramatic for the news people to claim they will be given the "power" of life or death, more slurs on some dedicated people.

I agree with Jack H

(There`s always a first time!)

The risk is too high for a nurse.
This will open the door to legal claims against the Hospital should the decision by the nurse be deemed premature. We always have a Senior Doctor on duty to carry such appraisals.

As a nursing sister I'm not sure yet whether this will apply at my level or more senior such as Matron. One thing people are being made more aware of through this story, is just how low the success rate in resucitation is even in hospitals. What the story isn't following up with is the likeliehood of complications/problems that face those who are resucitated. They can include prolonged stays in Intensive Care setting attached to lots of equipment and death being merely prolonged. Even those who survive and go home may have been left with comprimised cardiac functions, poorer mobility and in some circumstances brain damage caused through lack or greatly reduced levels of oxygen received by the brain during the cardiac arrest. Finally, the more common scenario is a repeated or multiple cardiac arrest which is traumatic for all involved.

The people most likely to be first on scene or witness a cardiac arrest are nurses and often patients are found at night when Dr's aren't immediately on scene to make a decision about how appropriate it is to attempt resucitation. This leaves the nurses in the highly uneviable position of having to start resucitation when they know it would be futile, (the patient is already cold), and in situations where they are fairly sure the patient did not want resucitation but without clear documentation they have no choice. For the nurse NOT to start resucitation where there is no clear order is illegal and could lead to serious disciplinary action.

What I hope will happen is that this will prompt Dr's into discussion with families and patients much sooner into the patient stay. Quite honestly it should be part of the admission process and a routine question. People most definitely should be involved in the process but they should be considering it in the same way as Living Wills and organ donation. We should all ask ourselves how heroic should the measures be that Dr's use to maintain our life once we have been made aware that the outcomes/prognosis is only 15-20% at best?

I hope it might promote better communication and exploration of views among families, and perhaps encourage a bit more reality in terms of expectations of what medicine can achieve.

As a more senior nurse, in some ways I suppose I would welcome the opportunity to prevent uncessary and distressing attempts to restart the heart of patients who are clearly dead, or whose death was already inevitable. The worry however, comes from knowing that this society is already very becoming more and more litigious in nature and one that feels the need to blame someone for all their problems.

Far better that Dr's use their medical knowledge and expertise to explain their decisions and perhaps for families to take them on board and remember that however seriously we take their view and listen to their opinion, the final decision should rest with the Dr. After all it is the patient who would be resucitated not the family, the patient who would live with the consequences.

Hopefully, as we all become more educated and realistic about what resucitation is and what it means, we will all feel more confident in addressing it from the start and have clearer views on what we want Dr's to do and how far we really want them to go when the odds start to swing so severly against us that even our heart can't keep going.
Kuta.

There will be an extremely detailed discussion on this issue before it becomes into being, there must be good reasons why the BMA are involved, if we cannot look to them to make the right decisions who can we turn to, after all is the saying still good, Trust me I am a Doctor? lol

I think they have been doing this for a very long time already.

Someone calls the doctor or not when someone stops breathing. How naive everyone is.

i'm not happy about this at all

it should be the responsibility of a doctor