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Greedy man suspended over celery incident
Clive Greedy, a paramedic who was sacked after he ate celery as a patient lay dying has been suspended for six months by a health professionals body.
Favourite quote: “At one point John Jones took my attention away from the monitor by gesturing with a prawn he had taken from the colander in the sink. He said, does anyone want a prawn?” Mr Claydon told the hearing. He said he then saw the prawn on the dying man’s chin.
And this: "I then heard Clive Greedy saying nice celery,” Clive Greedy, a paramedic who was sacked after he ate celery as a patient lay dying has been suspended for six months by a health prof... more -
NYC considers “organ removal” ambulance
"Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead. The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.
The "rapid-organ-recovery ambulance," still in the early planning stages, could raise a host of ethical questions and strike some families as ghoulish. But top medical officials in the Fire Department and Bellevue Hospital say it has the potential to save hundreds of lives.
Generally in the U.S., only people who die at hospitals are used as organ donors, because doctors are on hand with life-support machinery and other equipment to preserve the organs and remove them before they spoil. Surgeons have only a few critical hours before kidneys, livers and other body parts suffer damage that renders them unusable.
Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue, said the ambulance project could spark an "amazing transformation" by substantially increasing the pool of donors. The system would be one of the first of its kind in the U.S., although similar ambulances have operated successfully in parts of Europe, he said.
The transplant ambulance would turn up at the scene of a death mere minutes after regular paramedics ceased efforts to resuscitate a patient. The team would begin work almost immediately, administering drugs and performing chest compressions intended to keep the organs viable.
Sometimes, those steps would be taken before getting approval from a relative and without knowledge of the departed's wishes regarding organ donation.
Any organ removals would be done at the hospital only. And no organs would be removed without getting the family's express consent.
But experts in medical and legal ethics said they still see potential for trouble.
"Starting this process without knowing whether the decedent wanted to be a donor could be a problem," said Maxwell Mehlman, director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Distraught relatives could be unnerved by the site of a transplant team arriving so soon after a death. Some might have a religious objection to organ donation, and be enraged to learn that a body had been moved and injected with fluids.
Other families might also - rightly or wrongly - question whether the paramedics curtailed their lifesaving efforts because a patient had valuable organs.
"A lot of people don't trust the medical system to begin with, and in the city, you have additional class and race issues to deal with," said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I could very easily see a family saying, 'If it was a white, rich person, that person would have been saved. But instead you've sent the meat wagon.'"
Doctors working on developing a pilot program say they realize the sensitivity of the issue and are building precautions into the system, which would start with just one ambulance."
By David B Caruso
Associated Press Writer "Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may so... more -
14 Year Old Boy Suffers Heart Attack!
A 14 year old boy was taken to a hospital in critical condition after suffering a heart attack while playing baseball. The boy has had heart trouble in the past.
It happened during a Little League baseball game in Boise Idaho.
Paramedic says bystanders gave the boy CPR until medical help arrived. They most likely saved this boys life.
The boy's name is not being relased and his condition is not known at this time. A 14 year old boy was taken to a hospital in critical condition after suffering a heart attack while playing baseball. The boy has had... more
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