BREAKING NEWS: Care homes in the UK caught using death penalty drugs, was this to artificially bump the COVID numbers up?
(thedailybeagle.substack.com)
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Yes, sorry, I meant to address the part about accelerating death and ended up on a tangent. Of course it is possible to overdose and hasten death using morphine, but legitimate practice "should" prevent that. In hospitals or facilities, controlled substances are tightly controlled. The doctor has to order it properly, the pharmacy has to deliver it to the locked cabinet, nurses need to scan it to verify the correct order, administer it, and account for anything they remove from the locked cabinet. Every stage in the process has to verify that the order is correct and the medication/dose/route being given is correct. Nurses are the last line of defense for patient protection from medication errors and they are the ones usually held responsible for them, so they are expected to refuse to administer questionable medication orders. I haven't worked in a facility in several years, so maybe some of that was changed during COVID, and it's also possible that medication dosing guidelines may have been changed amidst the other shenanigans.
Well, my daughter maintains that hospice is much better equipped to deal with dying patients and she is probably right. I just know that there is some leeway on how much morphine a patient gets according to their need. That may be the variable. It is hard to ascertain exactly what the hospitals and nursing homes were doing because the monetary incentives associated with dying with covid seemed to override ethics. I feel like the entire medical system has collapsed to a certain degree...at least any integrity is gone. But hey, that is just me...I told my husband to take me out back and shoot me instead of ever putting me in a nursing home...haha. He is a general contractor and does a lot of work for Pruitt nursing homes in Georgia and to tell you the truth...I wasn't kidding...