'You're not God': Doctors and patient families say HCA hospitals push hospice care

[dalton99a]

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

'You're not God': Doctors and patient families say HCA hospitals push hospice care
Transfers to hospice care from HCA's facilities grew faster than the national average, while HCA's "in hospital" deaths were lower than average, data shows.
June 21, 2023, 5:30 AM CDT
By Gretchen Morgenson

As Marisol Perez fought for her life in a Texas hospital in autumn 2021, her mother, Alma Salas, sat with her every day praying. Perez, then 42, had such a virulent case of Covid and pneumonia that doctors at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center, an HCA Healthcare facility, had put her  on a ventilator and  into a coma  to try to save her.

Salas said she believed her daughter would pull through, but doctors and nurses at the hospital kept telling her otherwise. Over 10 days in October, less than a month after Perez entered St. David’s, Salas received repeated visits from a palliative care nurse,  her hospital record shows. Every other day,  Salas said,  the nurse urged  her to initiate end-of-life care for her daughter. Several of Perez’s doctors also pressed Salas to remove her daughter from the ventilator, she said, in visits confirmed by details from Perez’s chart.

On one occasion, six or seven doctors and nurses gathered around Perez’s bed, Salas said. "We really feel it is in the best interests of your daughter to let her go,"  she recalled one doctor telling her.

Salas held firm. “I don’t have the authority to take anyone’s life,” she said she told them.

A month later, St. David’s discharged Perez, her chart shows. She went on to make a full recovery.

....