Fury at ‘do not resuscitate’ notices given to Covid patients with learning disabilities
By James Tapper,
The Guardian
| 02. 13. 2021
People with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog.
Mencap said it had received reports in January from people with learning disabilities that they had been told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19.
The Care Quality Commission said in December that inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices had caused potentially avoidable deaths last year.
DNACPRs are usually made for people who are too frail to benefit from CPR, but Mencap said some seem to have been issued for people simply because they had a learning disability. The CQC is due to publish a report on the practice within weeks.
The disclosure comes as campaigners put growing pressure on ministers to reconsider a decision not to give people with learning disabilities priority for vaccinations. There is growing evidence that even those with a mild disability are more likely to die if they contract the coronavirus...
Related Articles
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Alcott Wei, South China Morning Post | 07.13.2024
China has banned all clinical research involving germline genome editing under a newly released ethics guideline.
Germline gene engineering relates to altering the DNA in sperm, eggs or early embryos to introduce changes that can be inherited.
“Any clinical research...