NYC's "Organ Donation Ambulance?"

[tiedyedbeth]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4822866&page=1

This just gives me the creeps.

[Dustdevil]

Jeeze, what a bunch of idiots.

Far more troubling is the idea that emergency medical personnel staffing the ambulances could be faced with a dilemma of either doing everything possible to save a patient, or acting with the chief interest of saving organs

Melhman adds that some may worry whether the responders on such an ambulance would be under any pressure to stop trying to revive a patient in order to begin saving his or her organs.

"Once this process begins and it is widely known, there will be instances where the EMTs are suspected or accused of giving up resuscitation attempts too soon in order to get a corpse still warm enough to do the procedures for organ harvest."

Hard to believe that nonsense was actually written by a physician. Certainly not a physician who has ever spent a shift on an ambulance.

• 1. Attempts to resuscitate and attempts to maintain organs are THE SAME THING!!! There is NO conflict of interest.

2. It won't result in stopping efforts to resuscitate. In fact, it will result in prolonged efforts to resuscitate.

3. It won't result in patients being declared dead prematurely. It will result in patients being taken to the hospital instead of being left on the scene, only to later find out they weren't really dead, as seems to happen in Detroit and Philly every few months.

4. Fielding special units to do this is stupid. To be effective, the original responding unit needs to be the one to transport. Otherwise, lost time defeats the purpose.

5. If a community is providing adequate EMS resources in the first place, then this would not even require special units to achieve.

[Asysin2leads]

It continues to amaze me the sheer amount of ignorance, even amongst supposed professionals, when it comes to organ harvesting.

The big concept that Dr. Quackenbush from SCREWU (Case Western Reserve) can't seem to grasp is the purpose of these ambulances is to PROVIDE RESCUSITATION even after someone is declared brain dead for the purpose of maintaining perfusion to the body. His comments not only are inflammatory but serve to reinforce myths about organ harvesting. But hey, so long as it gets your name in the paper, right? It should tell you something when ABC News can't get a doctor in the city they are reporting about to comment on their story. Way to cost some lives to sell a few commercial spots. I'm going to send a nasty letter to whoever that doctor was from Case Western. What a maroon.

[Don1977]

"dispatch the first ambulance service in the country equipped to preserve the organs of the newly deceased"

Your kidding right?

[CBEMT]

Similar but different- apparently there's a private transport service in Boston that one of the major hospitals up there (Brigham?) contracts with to transport a harvest team to outlying hospitals with donors when they have a critical recipient in-house.

I was talking to the crew of the truck one night as they were awaiting the team and organ. Basically a BLS unit responds to the facility, pick up the "team," and then it's lights and sirens off to the hospital where the donor is. They sit around for a few hours waiting for the patient to be unplugged, die, and be harvested (apparently there are occasions where that takes longer than you'd think, like this particular night). Then it's lights and sirens back to the recipient hospital. He said more often they did the same thing locally, but met the organ at Logan from a fixed-wing flight instead of traveling.

As soon as we were finished talking, the resident who made the trip came out of the hospital, half-running. They all jumped back into the ambulance, the Igloo cooler was strapped to the stretcher, and off they went.

[Just Plain Ruff]

speaking of organ harvester groups

I have a friend who was working for a organ procurement company. He had a vehicle with lights and sirens on it and he was travelling on the highway and came to a toll booth.

He busted thru the toll booth at 85 miles per hour and by the time the highway patrol caught up with him they were really pissed.

He lost his job and paid about 2K in fines.

[Richard B the EMT]

Ruffems, 2 things. One, the fool got fired for the excessive speed? Good!, And Two, this is something should have also been mentioned in one of the strings on excessive speed for ambulances.

Thanks for the information, nonetheless!