Medical staff are less likely to resuscitate newborns than they are children and adults, according to a new study.
A team of researchers at l'Université de Montréal studied the approach of the medical staff of various Montreal hospitals practicing resuscitation maneuvers on patients of different ages. The study focused on the arrival of several patients at the same time in the emergency room, when there was only one doctor present.
The aim was to find out who would be a priority for staff, using a questionnaire that reveals that when confronted with different scenarios of patients in critical condition, medical staff were more likely to save adults and children than newborns.
The findings were published in The Journal of Pediatrics. The decisions of life and death are among the most difficult to take in medicine, said the principal investigator of this study, Amelie Du Pont-Thibodeau. The survey was conducted by four authors, three of whom are physicians.
The survey interviewed 50 resident physicians and 30 nurses, all working in intensive-care units of Montreal pediatric hospitals.
They found that respondents are generally better able to accept infant death, even when the prognosis for resuscitation is comparable to that for older patients.
Called to justify their choices, doctors and nurses raised the best survival predictions of those who were saved.
But when it was pointed out to them that the prognosis of the newborns was identical to that of the person chosen for the resuscitation maneuver, they offered explanations concerning the newborn's status of person, the question of the level of attachment of the family, and the fact that they did not yet have a "story".