“In Downtown Eastside Vancouver, it’s heroin and other drugs quite often. So it’s quite a toxic mix sometimes,” he said. “But most of these individuals recovered. Not always back to 100 per cent, but they would recover and they would have some meaningful life beyond their overdose usually.
“But these fentanyl overdoses, these people, they truly lingered in the ICU. And once they left here, they probably had very little meaningful life.”
Cases involved people as young as 18 and as old as 60, he said, but the majority were in their 20s and 30s.
“In critical care, we always get a lot of sad cases, particularly in a hospital like this, where we deal with a lot of marginalized individuals,” said Dorscheid.
An overarching goal of the staff at St. Paul’s is to strive to provide “compassionate, non-judgmental care” to those who need it the most.
“We become their family. It’s a big part of our job, but it’s incredibly draining,” said Dorscheid.
“The problem in Canada is that we’re not really designed for long-term care facilities, particularly for people that might need long-term care for 10 or 20 more years.”
from Update Trend News http://bit.ly/2MnJiMD
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