John Sloan is a senior academic physician in priorities Department life essay doctor Family Practice at the University life essay doctor British Columbia, and has spent most of his 30 years' practice caring for the frail elderly in Vancouver. Photo by Submitted photo. Ernie life essay doctor his real name was 92 and priorities life with lung cancer.
Living is the important word, because although the hospital told priorities in life essay doctor he had about four weeks to live, here he was still holed up in his little apartment 18 months later, being looked after by neighbours source friends. He was essay doctor only three medicines: A doctor or nurse visited every few weeks.
Ernie needed daily help and knew he was living on borrowed time, but he was content to enjoy simple pleasures for as long as he could. Things had not always been so straightforward. He had come home from hospital with a new cancer diagnosis essay doctor 13 medications, on the roster of four separate care and support agencies, and with a list of specialist appointments to keep at life essay doctor hospital.
Seeing this, friends in his apartment building got involved, simplified the care and support, did some of the home care themselves, and found him a family doctor with a team of nurses and rehabilitation professionals visiting frail people at home.
The doctor stopped a lot of the priorities in life essay doctor /assignment-nursing-essay-decision-making.html doctor over medical follow-up from the specialists.
Why do the Ernies of this world need special help from friends to get the kind of care they want? The answer is that our health-care system is weighted priorities in life essay doctor prevention with drugs and ambulance-to-hospital rescue from disaster. In priorities in life essay doctor communities, programs to doctor these needs are slowly coming together.
What priorities that look like? Care plans are individual: But read more the circumstances, help in crisis is there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Guidelines-driven, prevention-and-rescue health care can be staggeringly expensive because it lives on high-tech evaluation, specialists, hospitals, procedures and new medications. You do have to be careful life essay about saving money in the politically polarized, subtle, and finicky health-care economics debate, especially in the United States.
Some people fear that giving the frail elderly the kind of care they want is tantamount to rationing.
They eye every suggestion priorities in life essay doctor cost-cutting with suspicion. And they have a point. But the bare truth is that hands-on, low-tech, honestly caring, individual primary attention to old priorities in life essay doctor is priorities in life essay doctor much, much better for them than the grotesquely expensive alternative.
A rare natural win-win. One night Ernie coughed up blood and got very short of priorities in life essay doctor. He was frightened, and so were the neighbours he called to help. He died before morning. I invite you to take a look at my book A Bitter Priorities in life essay doctor How the Medical System is Failing the Elderly and at my website sunshiners.
He is the author of A Bitter Pill: His innovative primary care practice for the priorities in life essay doctor elderly has been adopted by Vancouver Coastal Health and is expanding. Sloan lectures throughout North America on care of the elderly. We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to read more personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful.
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