'Lansley must listen to nurses on the front line' Musings Part 3: Father and Son – what should the son do ?
Posted in: Older people's nursing | Specialist nursing areas
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The scenario we are considering is specifically this one – only what we can read here is ‘true’, and nothing more or less:
A father is living at home, with only one family carer, who is his son. This is supposed to be an EoLC situation, so the father is expected to die within at most a year. Father has been seeing his GP and is, therefore, ‘sort of aware’ of treatment options and outcomes.
The father has not refused CPR, and is not considered to be sufficiently ‘near death’ for his death to be considered ‘expected’, or for a ‘clinical’ (i.e. for CPR to be predicted to fail) DNAR order to be in place: so there cannot be a DNAR ‘Instruction’ in place. The
expectations for a CPA could range from ‘unlikely’ to ‘almost sufficiently likely, for the situation to be an ’expected death‘’. The father is in some sort of discomfort, which he considers to be severe. Either pain, or something else, such as struggling to breathe. This
could be either continuous or episodic in nature.
One evening, the father initiates a conversation with ‘Son, I’m really struggling here. I really can‘t put up with this. Would it upset you, if I’m just allowed to die, if you think I have stopped breathing?‘. It ends with ’We‘ll sort this out with the GP tomorrow, but if I die before then, don’t phone 999‘.
The two questions, are these. Firstly, if the father seems to ‘die’/stop breathing/enter CPA before anybody else has become aware of the conversation, what should the son do ? Secondly, in that situation (when he thinks his dad is in the process of dying) what law applies to the son ?
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