Officials look to nursing homes for ventilators
As the number of COVID-19 patients climbs and health officials hunt for ventilators to treat them, nursing homes across the United States have a cache ― about 8,200 of the lifesaving machines, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Most of the machines are in use, often by people who’ve suffered a brain injury or stroke. Some of those residents are in a vegetative state and have remained on a ventilator for years.
Of course, commandeering those units would set up a monumental ethical dilemma: Do you remove life support for a long-term nursing care patient in order to give a COVID-19 patient a better chance of survival?
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced an executive order that ventilators not in use by hospitals be redeployed to ICUs. And he’s calling in the New York National Guard to facilitate the order. “We know where every ventilator is,” Cuomo said Sunday. Nursing home ventilators are not included in his order, but they are included in the state’s tally of the machines.
Dr. Michael Kalafer, a pulmonologist and the medical director at two San Diego subacute units, said he can’t imagine taking one of his patients off a ventilator because it’s needed for someone else. “I severely doubt we’ll take [a hypothetical] Mrs. Smith off a ventilator because she’s 80 and has been on it for a few years and has not gotten better,” Kalafer said.
But these are precisely the decisions bioethicists are being asked to weigh in on as the country confronts the crush of COVID-19 patients overwhelming the health care system.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nursing-home-ventilators-hospitals-amid-coronavirus-crisis/story?id=70018414&cid=clicksource_4380645_4_heads_hero_live_headlines_hed
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