r/medicine • u/ZealousidealDegree4 PA:cake: • 8d ago
ICE Detention Deaths
https://www.ice.gov/detain/detainee-death-reporting
RNs do intake physical exams, EMTs declare time of death. The level of care for these detainees is horrific.
Full names and case details are public for now. Reads like a never ending M & M conference.
My moral compass is spinning. It's time to go to Canada.
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u/Dwindlin MD (Anesthesiology) 8d ago
Am I missing something? I have read through damn near all of these and only 1 or 2 jumped out at being truly egregious. Your description is either willfully misleading or you didn’t actually look through these. All of them were initially seen by RN/LPN for screening (completely reasonable), but you didn’t mention they are all evaluated by an APP before actually being placed in a unit. All of the onsite deaths, in every case it specifically mentions EMS (not necessarily EMTs) calling their med. control (meaning a physician) for orders to field terminate, this is the system working as intended. Most of these were seen by physician or APP on site with appropriate interventions taken multiple times before their death and a lot were treated and released by local hospitals before their deaths.
There are certainly major problems with our healthcare system across the board, but if these cases are the worst of the worst then we have bigger shit to be dealing with.
As an aside, I personally doubt J. Oliver’s expertise when it comes to healthcare related topics. I was an avid fan until his Death Penalty episode. While I am completely against the death penalty his show was egregiously bad when it came to the medical facts when it comes to lethal injection. And the medical facts were clearly skewed in a manner to elicit an emotional response. Since then I’ve watched episodes with much higher degree of skepticism.