24.07.09
Caveat
There was sad news this morning. It was on the news as “the government aren’t doing enough”.
There’s a pregnant woman horribly ill with flu. So ill she’s been flown to Sweden to have ECMO. The only place in the UK that does ECMO for adults is at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester. And she can’t go there as it’s full at the mo.
You may know that that’s where I used to work. One of the places I worked there was in ITU, where they did the ECMO.
Now the caveat: My info may well be old.
The main reason that there’s no other adult ECMO site in the UK is that it tended not to work well for adults. It’s great for newborns. It just doesn’t do well for adults. Have a look here and go to the leaflet at the bottom; it doesn’t even mention adults.
My first thought on hearing this news was “they’re keeping her alive long enough for the baby to grow to viable”. Would you want the NHS to spend huge amounts of cash for such a service? Is it really the government’s fault for not rolling out a treatment that’s not great, obscenely expensive and still in the research phase?
Again I hope that I’m missing a lot of work that’s been done over the last 7 years since I was there.
Fingers crossed for her.