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Hi it’s Patrik Hutzel from INTENSIVECAREATHOME.COM.AU where we provide TAILOR MADE SOLUTIONS for long-term ventilated Adults& Children with Tracheostomy by improving their Quality of life and where we also provide TAILOR MADE SOLUTIONS to hospitals and Intensive Care Units to save money and resources, whilst providing Quality Care!
In last week’s blog I shared “Home Care for long-term intensive care patients” where INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME was featured in an article from the ACCCN(Australian College of Critical Care nursing).
You can check out last week’s BLOG and last week’s article here!
In this week’s blog I want to point towards an article that was published on the ABC website on the 29/9/2014
The title of the article is “Majority of Australians not dying the way they want to, Grattan Institute report finds, as care becomes more institutionalised”
The article highlights once again that
- A good death is where people can die with dignity and with control over their circumstances
- Dying is Australia is more institutionalised than other countries
- That a public discussion as well as service providers are needed to give people the best chances of dying well
- Dying in hospitals is very expensive and a great deal of money could be saved if people are given the opportunity to die at home
Again, whilst INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME mainly provides a better quality of life for long-term ventilated Adults& Children with Tracheostomies and their Families, we also believe and know from experience that some Patients in Intensive Care who approach their end of life sometimes over many weeks and many months on a ventilator would be much better off to spend their final weeks or months at home!
This provides once again a “win-win” situation, improves the quality of end of life for Patients and their Families and saves money and frees up much needed resources in Intensive Care!
Don’t forget to leave your thoughts and comments after the article!
Below is the article or you can check out the link to the ABC website
Majority of Australians not dying the way they want to, Grattan Institute report finds, as care becomes more institutionalised
The majority of Australians are not dying the way they would like to, a new report says, with experts calling for greater public discussion around the benefits of palliative care.
The Grattan Institute’s Dying Well report found 70 per cent of Australians want to die in their homes but only 14 per cent do, with half dying in hospital and a third in residential care.
Dr Hal Swerissen, who co-authored the report, said more Australians are dying from old age than they did 60 years ago and our healthcare system has failed to adapt to the change.
“There is increasingly people now dying in old age where 50, 60 years ago, more younger people died and you had a much greater emphasis on the healthcare system intervening at all possible cost,” he said.
AUDIO: End of life care should be less institutionalised: report(The World Today)
“When you are in your 80s or 90s and frail and you have a set of chronic diseases, it’s difficult for the healthcare system to intervene successfully, so treatment is more difficult.
“We have got a healthcare system that is set up largely to do treatment and it is important that we have a moment in time where people can reflect on what they would like to have happen when it looks like there is not much benefit continuing with treatment.
“A good death is one where people have the opportunity to die with dignity and where they have control over the circumstances,” he said.
The report found dying in Australia is more institutionalised than in most other countries.
It calls for more public discussion on the issue, as well as an expansion of community-based palliative care to give people the best chance of dying well.
“They (palliative care patients) get to choose where they die, with whom they die and how they die and to do that they then have the opportunity … to say goodbye and to put their affairs in order and to make some sense of their own death and their own life,” Dr Swerissen said.
Dying in hospital is expensive, expert says
Dr Rod MacLeod, a professor in palliative care at the University of Sydney and a senior staff specialist at Hammond Care, said the best way to enable a good death is to provide “care in the home in the last few days of life”.
“The program that we are doing with New South Wales Health allows for up to 48 hours of care,” Dr MacLeod said.
“It can be all in one lot or it can be interspersed over days or even weeks and that seems to enable people, most of the time, to stay where they want to stay.”
The report said doubling the number of people who die at home will cost $237 million a year, but the same amount of institutional care funds could be released to pay for it.
Dr MacLeod said overall a great deal of money would be saved if more people died at home.
“Dying in hospital is expensive,” he said.
“If you think of all the infrastructure and the interventions that happen, there’s a lot of interventions, there’s a lot of medications, a lot of staff involved whereas if you’re dying at home, the medications can be kept to a minimum, the staff are kept to a minimum.”
What are your thoughts?
Do you think that death and dying is institutionalised in Australia?
Share your thoughts and experiences!
Please also note that INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME has been selected as a preferred provider for Queensland Health Services as part of the recent “Hospital in the Home” tender.
You can also contact me on 041 094 2230 if you want to know more about how we can help you, your Intensive Care Unit and your Patients and Families.
Thank you for tuning into this week’s BLOG!
This is Patrik Hutzel from www.intensivecareathome.com.au and I’ll see you again in another update next week.