[ad_1]
Press? Tap or click to listen to this story in less than a minute!
It's a situation in which no one wants to ever be. You are in the hospital, sitting with a loved one in the terminal phase. You know that there is not much time left, but you hope everything will be fine. Perhaps the latest test results will show that there is still a possibility of weeks and not days.
The doctor comes in and this is not what you wanted to hear. Your family member will die and it will happen very soon.
It is already quite difficult to hear the prognosis of a doctor standing in person. It's even harder for a family, who said that a doctor had told him this devastating news – from the video screen of a robot that had just rolled into the room .
Not a routine visit
When Ernest Quintana, 78, could no longer breathe and that he had been taken to hospital earlier this month, his family already knew that he was dying of death. A chronic lung disease. They did not know when.
At the hospital, a nurse entered the room to announce that a doctor would soon be visiting his home. So, shortly after, when a robot arrived in the room, Quintana's granddaughter, Annalisia Wilharm, told The Associated Press that she thought it would be a visit from routine.
This was not it.
The doctor said that there was no more lungs; no lung with which to work. Wilharm repeats what the doctor says from a distance, because his grandfather does not hear well on one side and the robot can not move to the other side of the bed. ;hospital.
She asks if the next step is palliative home care. "I do not know if he'll go home," the doctor answers. Quintana died two days after arriving at the hospital.
A loved one was gone and, to add insult to injury, the family is not happy with the way it was handled. His daughter stated that such information should have been transmitted by a human being, not a machine.
Empathy and technology
Telemedicine is the most common formula for doctors and nurses who see patients remotely via a video call or now, with screens housed in a small vertical wheeled robot. And the hospital in this case, the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, Calif., Defends its use of telemedicine.
In a written response, hospital administrators told the AP that the robot's visit followed a previous consultation. They said that this did not replace previous conversations with the late Quintana or his family, nor did it serve to establish the initial diagnosis.
The policy of the hospital is to have a nurse or doctor in the room during remote consultations. But they also said that it was a very unusual situation and that they regretted not having responded to the patient's expectations.
Although telemedicine and the use of robots provide a practical solution in many situations, technology can also easily remove the very essence of empathy and sharing feelings with one another.
Doctor wins lawsuit to remove his name from Google search results
In Europe, five years ago, it was decided that people had "the right to be forgotten". This basically meant that people have the right to disappear if they wish, including on Internet search engines.
Click or tap here to find out how a doctor got the right to hide his past.
[ad_2]
Source link