Informing patient death to relatives is an art. Without having proper methodology, lot of doctors and hospitals got into trouble and more issues raised later to answer. In a case of an young girl treated for poisoning in a private hospital, the death caused furore among relatives and doctors who attended got sleepless nights because of that is an example of how to crack the death news to relatives depending on their educational status, background in the form of villagers or urbanites and the age of the patients and the time of admission and death interval, the cost incurred for treatment.
There are guidelines which I followed when I was an Emergency Physician of a corporate hospital in Tirunelveli. 1. If you want to try DC shock in a patient who almost died, which was costing Rs.1000 per shock procedure at that time in 1994 at our hospital which was a good amount, inform the patients’s…
