Victory for the Mail in ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ scandal
Hospital apologises to pensioner, 94, for shock order
SPRIGHTLY 94-year- old Lucy Jeal was more than entitled to cut up and bin the red-bordered notice sent to her by the NHS.
For weeks, the note – ordering medics not to save her if her heart failed – had seriously upset the lively pensioner.
But after The Daily Mail highlighted her plight and revealed that Do Not Resuscitate notices are being handed to thousands without their consent, Mrs Jeal’s hospital has apologised and told her to ‘dispose’ of it.
She received the ‘community DNR’ by post just 24 hours after a surprise visit to her council flat from a ‘frailty nursing practitioner’ who said he was there to discuss her end-of-life plans.
The formal letter accompanying the DNR – which was meant to be put upon her wall – was signed by the same frailty nurse as well as by a geriatric consultant at her local south London hospital.
It said reviving the widow if her heart stopped would ‘not be in her best interest’.
‘I cried when I got the DNR in late September,’ she said this week as she sliced up the document up with relief. ‘I have had sleepless nights for weeks,’ she added.
‘I even thought of throwing myself over Lambeth Bridge into the Thames. It was only my two sons, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren which stopped me.
‘The NHS is deliberately writing off people like me who they are meant to care for in old age. I think they want us to die.’
Mrs Jeal let the male ‘nursing practitioner’, who has also since apologised, into her three-bedroom flat because she thought it was the chiropodist ‘coming to do my feet’.
She insists she never agreed to the DNR notice during the nurse’s onehour visit. She is in excellent health for her age, and walks every day to the corner store with her shopping trolley or takes the bus to the supermarket half a mile away.
After we published her distressing story, we received letters and emails from people across Britain who have also been given DNRs, many without their agreement.
Some have found one popped secretly in their bag by nurses before they are discharged from wards. Others have even been told by hospital doctors that a DNR is being issued as they are slipping into unconsciousness before a nonlife threatening operation.
Alarmingly, we discovered that some are even in their forties, fifties and early sixties – including 45-yearold primary school assistant Sally Reynolds, of Ramsgate, Kent.
She was was rushed to hospital with life-threatening kidney problems on Christmas Eve 2019 – and later spotted a DNR in her hospital medical folder last spring.
She complained to a nurse and it has now been taken out of her medical folder, although she has no idea if it remains on her NHS computerised records. Many have given the Mail permission to pass on their letters to Government- appointed health watchdog, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), for scrutiny. They appear to have been caught up in a new NHS project designed to ‘ help’ those who are over 65 remain at home and end bed-blocking in hospitals. As part of the project, people are encouraged to make early decisions about their ‘advanced care’ – an NHS euphemism for end-of-life treatment.
An urgent investigation by the CQC is already under way into their ‘blanket use’ in care homes during the first Covid-19 wave last year.
This probe has since been extended to include their distribution by community doctors and nurses.
The worrying letters we received included one from Jenny Stubbs, aged 77. She said: ‘In 2019, I went into my local hospital for a planned gall bladder operation. I was just being taken into theatre after having an injection, when the consultant surgeon leant over me and said: “You know if you go into cardiac arrest, we will not resuscitate you.” He then walked off as I drifted off to sleep. I do have angina, but other than that I don’t see why I could possibly be considered for a DNR.’
As for Mrs Jeal, her NHS letter of apology ‘cancelling’ her DNR order has put a new spring in her step.
She and her family have been invited to meet her local medical team, which signed if off, to reassess her future care after the latest lockdown.
In the apology letter to Mrs Jeal, seen by the Mail, the frailty nurse noted that the pensioner felt the ‘principles’ of the DNR order had not been ‘explained sufficiently’ and that she did not agree with the decision to put it in place, adding: ‘I apologise for the distress this caused you and your family.’
CONDEMNED BY A ‘CARE PATHWAY’ ... AGAIN Mail, November 28, 2020