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Concern Shortage of Doctors Could Lead to Elderly Deaths
Scotland Today
Scotland
August 15, 2005
It is being claimed that elderly residents of Scottish care homes are dying in hospital emergency departments because there are not enough doctors available to treat them in their familiar surroundings.
Care home owners say they are finding it more and more difficult to get GPs to attend when their residents are reaching the end of their lives. The Executive denies it is a widespread problem.
Ambulances are used for accidents and emergencies. Getting patients to hospital quickly where they can be resuscitated vital to saving lives. But is it appropriate for elderly care home patients who are dying?
Rudy Crawford from Glasgow Royal Infirmary said: "If somebody is clearly at the end of their life and has a terminal condition there comes a point where people should be given effectively tender loving care and allowed to die of natural causes."
Scottish Care says staff have to dial 999 because changes to out-of-hours care mean it is getting more difficult to get doctors to visit patients who are extremely ill.
Joe Campbell, chairman of Scottish Care said: "It is a hugely disconcerting thing to the relatives of elderly people who are being uprooted at that time of their life when they are particularly frail."
In Glasgow systems are in place to ensure patients who need a GP at any time of day or night can find one. But increasingly elderly patients from car homes are turning up at Accident and Emergency wards. Doctors say most GP's do still work out of hours
Dr Dean Marshall from the General Practitioner's Committee of the BMA said: "The thing that has changed is how you contact the emergency service which is NHS 24 and as I say it is well documented the problems that they have had and they are working to resolve that and maybe this is an issue about the time it takes to get a response from them."
Deputy Health Minister Lewis MacDonald MSP commented: "Clearly 90+% of what NHS 24 has done in the past has been successful. The difference, the gap where there has been a problem, we want to address that and the measures they have taken recently are helping us to do so."
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