By DEXTER DUGGAN
Because of a trend toward euthanasia at hospices, everyday people need to learn how to be advocates for patients in order to defend a vulnerable person should the occasion arise, the president of a new organization defending the value of human life told The Wanderer in an interview.
“Hospice has really been infiltrated by people with a euthanasia mentality,” while good hospices are “getting rarer and rarer” due to growth in for-profit hospices, said president Julie Grimstad, LPN, one of the four women who started the Healthcare Advocacy and Leadership Organization (HALO).
Among their goals are a national 24/7 hotline to provide assistance and, a HALO pamphlet says, long-range plans for “safe havens,” described as “sanctuaries for the medically vulnerable…state-of-the-art medical facilities able to provide critical treatment and care for patients who are denied wanted life-sustaining treatment by other health-care providers.”
HALO’s website is www.halorganization.com, which features resources for learning about advocacy.
In a video of a patient advocacy seminar at the site, Grimstad tells of how she first became a patient advocate “by accident” in 1985 when a 92-year-old neighbor, Jane, “fit as a fiddle,” had to go into a hospital for the first time, for a kidney infection, but she was “terrified” at this new setting.
“We trust our health-care providers, but they can’t always be trusted,” Grimstad says.
Jane was given an anti-anxiety medication, Haldol, which has the unfortunate side effect in some elderly people of paralyzing neck or throat muscles, Grimstad says, and Jane couldn’t swallow to receive nutrition.
Researching the problem, Grimstad says, she learned about Haldol’s effect from her own pharmacist, so she and Jane’s daughter went to Jane’s doctor, but he refused to take her off the Haldol and challenged them to get another doctor if they didn’t trust him — “so we did.”
“I was taken totally by surprise that a doctor could be so careless with a human life,” Grimstad says in the video.
Earlier in the video, she describes a patient advocate as “someone who has an undivided interest in protecting the welfare of a vulnerable patient in a health-care setting.”
Doctors and nurses “are not our enemy,” she says. “Many of them are there to serve us completely and we can trust them completely, but we need to learn how to discern the difference” between the good and bad.
Grimstad told The Wanderer of receiving a call directly from a woman whose husband had left her and she wanted to commit suicide because she was lonely, but often calls come from other parties who have suspicions about how someone else is being treated, perhaps by abuse, starvation, or neglect.
The solution may be to report to a hospital administrator, a state department of health, or even the police, Grimstad said — although medical personnel may wave off the police by citing their professional medical status.
More and more people are “being admitted to hospice who don’t even qualify for hospice, and within a few weeks they’re dead,” she said.
She told of a man healthy enough to enter a hospice using his walker, but the facility quickly put a catheter into him, “and he was dead within two weeks. . . .
“This is really hurting good hospices, because they’re being tarred with the same brush” as bad ones, Grimstad said.
There’s no website where a person could find a listing of all the good hospices, Grimstad said, but the HALO site has a list of questions to ask the facilities to determine their suitability, “Questions to Ask a Hospice BEFORE Admission.” The facilities’ answers need to be in writing, she added, in case they don’t deliver later.
The site also has information on a list of drugs “needed to understand treatment options that are proposed and to evaluate these choices for effectiveness of care.” It’s titled, “Drugs Commonly Used in Hospice and Palliative Care.”
It warns: “Be vigilant. Not all health-care providers are ethical. Numerous reports from families of hospice and palliative-care patients indicate that a one-size-fits-all pattern of administering a combination of opioids and anti-anxiety drugs has emerged. Whether or not patients have pain and/or agitation, they may begin to receive these drugs upon admission.”
“If anyone knows of good hospices,” or good doctors, Grimstad said, “let us know.”
HALO’s address is P.O. Box 324, Chisago City, MN 55013, and it may be reached online at feedback@halorganization.com. Grimstad told The Wanderer: “More and more doctors are either going along with this Culture of Death . . . or they’re leaving the medical profession. In Canada, doctors are being forced” to do euthanasia, or leave.
HALO was founded by people “who want to get patients to safety” and out of the way of a pro-death avalanche, she said. “Fixing everything at once seems like an impossible task, but helping one person at a time is not.”
The mission of HALO, its site says, “is to promote, protect, and advocate for the rights of the medically vulnerable through direct patient and family interactions; through community education and awareness programs; and through promotion and development of concrete ‘life-affirming health-care’ alternatives for those facing the grave consequences of health-care rationing and unethical practices, especially those at risk of euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
The organization had a large advertisement on page 8A of the September 12, 2019, hardcopy issue of The Wanderer.
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