Doing the Right Thing
Date: June 26, 2006

Ted’s medical situation is not a good one.

Just 26, he has muscular dystrophy and has been dependent on a ventilator for the past six years.

He came to our Emergency Care Center a few weeks ago with a broken tracheostomy tube, which, for Ted, is a lifeline.

Working with ER, our great Respiratory team replaced Ted’s tube, and his physician admitted him to the Intensive Care Unit to be treated for pneumonia.

The next morning, the ICU nurses reported Ted was having continuing problems, which caused his ventilator to alarm each breathing cycle–not only keeping his nurses busy, but also disturbing Ted’s rest.

Dr. Trammell Starr asked Ted’s family to bring his home ventilator to the hospital, and once it arrived, Ted’s care team discovered that ventilator was broken and was beyond repair.

This compounds an already tough issue. Ted is dependent on a machine that doesn’t work properly, and he doesn’t have insurance, Medicaid or Medicare to help pay for a new one.

Robert Ropp, who directs Floyd’s respiratory department, began to look for solutions, searching the Internet for a replacement ventilator. There was a catch, however. Ted has only one caregiver, and that individual would have had difficulty learning to operate and maintain any other kind of ventilator. Because of that, Dr. Starr advised that Ted’s ventilator would need to be replaced with exactly the same equipment.

Searching the Internet, Rob found an exact match and requested a meeting with Floyd administration for approval to buy the ventilator for Ted and send him home with it. Rob got the approval he needed and ordered the replacement from a distributor in St. Louis.

The ventilator arrived soon afterward and quickly put into service. By the next day, six days after he was admitted, Ted was discharged with his new ventilator.

Rob said it best in a report about the incident:

“This resulted in a win-win situation on all three ethical levels: moral, legal and economic. We did the right thing at the right time, and for the right reasons.”

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