I refer to the letter The day a public hospital took my mother away .
I am sorry for the loss of the writer’s dear mother in a public hospital, and offer him/her my sympathy for the loss. However, some misconceptions need to be cleared up about the perceived lack of care in the public hospital concerned.
The writer says that his/her mother had been in and out of hospital for a year before she passed away, and that each time she was admitted a blood test was done.
This is standard practice, and indeed is essential to understand her medical status at the time, and to formulate a care/treatment plan. That is, after all, the reason that she was taken to a hospital.
The writer further states that so much blood was taken that the patient was reduced to skin and bones. In fact, the amount of blood taken is always negligible, and that the taking of blood for tests cannot make a patient ‘skeletal’.
It is more likely that the underlying disease, which was likely to be cancer in some form, did this. This state is called cachexia, and is common with end-stage cancer, as well as end-stage kidney failure, and gross malnutrition.
The doctor who recommended her discharge even though she was in ICU probably did so to allow the patient to die at home, as no further medical intervention was possible, or indeed necessary for someone who had come to the end of her days on this Earth.
I am sure that this was conveyed to the family, but in the stress of the event, may not have been fully absorbed by them.
The family who then rushed her back to the hospital two days later, did not understand that the role of hospital, and doctors in general, in this situation, is to merely try to keep the patient as comfortable as possible in her final days.
An ICU admission in those circumstances is inappropriate, and indeed cruel. The Intensive Care Unit is for patients who would benefit from intensive care, not for the terminal care of someone who is dying.
As a doctor, I apologise for the lack of communication, and if a fellow doctor was found lacking in compassion. I do not, however, feel that the public hospital concerned caused the loss of the writer’s beloved mother.
