A policy that forced patients at Community Hospital in O’Leary to sign mandatory Do Not Resuscitate forms upon admittance has been revoked after residents and other officials raised concerns.
The O’Leary hospital is currently undergoing a transition that has seen its emergency room close and the hospital operate instead as an urgent care facility.
It is also undergoing a $6- million expansion with 15 more beds being added to the Margaret Stewart Ellis home within the hospital as well as the addition of the Beechwood Community Health Centre.
As an urgent care facility, only patients in need of palliative, restorative, convalescent or minor acute care treatment are admitted  but sometimes other types of acute care patients present to the hospital.
The Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) form is usually used only for palliative patients or those who are forced to stay at Community Hospital for situational reasons. It ensures liability is not placed upon the hospital, whose primary function is to act as an acute care facility. Patients needing urgent or emergency care are to go to the hospital in neighbouring Alberton.
But up until recently, Community Hospital was getting all admitted patients to sign the DNR form due to liability concerns.
Many in the community were upset about this.
“The concern was that if everybody had to sign the DNR form to be admitted to acute care in O’Leary then that’s not the definition of acute care as the general public would perceive it, nor is it as government would perceive it,” said O’Leary-Inverness MLA Robbie Henderson.
He received a number of complaints from residents, including a group of concerned citizens who did not believe everyone should have to sign away their right to be resuscitated upon admittance to the hospital.
“The original concept of the form was for palliative patients or the patient who steadfastly refused to go to another facility based on the recommendation of the physician, but as it seemed to evolve that everybody was having to sign it, it took awhile to identify that it was an issue and to come up with the measures to address the problem,” Henderson said.
After looking into the situation, the Health Department signed a contract with one physician at the hospital to take on responsibility for admitting patients who would also bear the responsibility of any potential liability concerns with regards to being resuscitated.
“Once the concerns were identified I asked my department to go back in and to evaluate the decision on the DNR, and certainly after some good discussions and some
good debates, we were able to indicate that the DNR is not part of the initial criteria,” Health Minister Doug Currie said Wednesday.