EDITORIALS
The resuscitation game continues: what is really going on?
1 Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
2 University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
3 St George’s School of Medicine, University of London, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to Professor Len Doyal, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK; l.doyal@qmul.ac.uk
Keywords: emergency medicine; ethics; resuscitation; do not resuscitate; DNR
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In 1992, one of us (Len Doyal) published a paper about the need for coherent guidelines to aid decisions on cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.1 By this time, much ink had been spilt on the importance of both informed consent and refusal of other forms of life sustaining treatment. However, a notable silence surrounded the variety of covert codes and signals entered into the notes of patients which indicated—without the patient’s knowledge—that they would not be resuscitated. A particularly stark example was a black star affixed to the cover of the clinical notes. Worse still was the revelation that all patients on some geriatric units were "not for resuscitation" for no other reason than their age.
All of this came to a head when the son of a competent elderly woman who was not terminally ill discovered a "do not resuscitate" (DNR) order in her notes and complained to the parliamentary ombudsman. Neither
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