End-of-life planning could cut health bill

A LACK of planning for the end of life, by patients and their families, costs the health service “a lot of money” and gives people “a lot of heartache”, according to an expert on emergency medicine in Ireland.

Dr Una Geary, of Ireland’s emergency medicine programme, was speaking at a major international conference on emergency medicine in Dublin this week.

More than 2,300 practitioners from 72 countries are attending the 14th International Conference on Emergency Medicine.

At yesterday’s open plenary session, a speaker from the floor put it to the panel that money spent on dying patients was one of the biggest unnecessary costs in emergency medicine.

In his experience, he said, many elderly people coming into emergency departments were being medicated and kept alive with no prospect of recovery, and the cost of this had to be addressed.

Prof Matthew Cooke, national clinical director for urgent and emergency care at the British department of health, agreed.

“How many times have we here found we are the first doctor to actually come out and talk to a family about their loved one’s end of life? An extra 20 minutes spent compassionately talking to the family saves days, if not weeks, of costly, futile care.”

He said everyone should be able to say where and how they would like to die. “We should not let people get to the end under the fluorescent lights of an intensive care unit.”

Dr Geary said it was about ensuring the patient got the “best-quality palliative care, when the time comes, that is needed”. There was a need for more end-of-life planning and work was being done on improving this here. “It would save so much money and so much heartache.”

The conference continues.