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I’m going to say it:
Hospital staff: you’re doing an incredible job. We are grateful.
PLEASE STOP CLAPPING PEOPLE BEING WHEELED OUT OF INTENSIVE CARE.
Everyone else: if you’ve shared a video of this and think it’s just a feel good thing, I understand why, but I’ll explain..
Hospital staff: you’re doing an incredible job. We are grateful.
PLEASE STOP CLAPPING PEOPLE BEING WHEELED OUT OF INTENSIVE CARE.
Everyone else: if you’ve shared a video of this and think it’s just a feel good thing, I understand why, but I’ll explain..
If you’ve never been in intensive care I’ll spare you all the horrible details and focus. I’ve been an intensive care patient quite a few times, it’s an incredibly disorientating place. Hallucinations, confusion, delirium and PTSD are all common among intensive care patients.
My amazing friend has just spent a week in intensive care with COVID. On leaving to go to a ward they had to tell staff they could not clap them out. They had been through hell but were left “feeling like they had kicked a puppy” when they declined (have their permission to post)
Why are patients being put in this position?
Can you imagine during a time of critical illness and extreme vulnerability, having to tell staff not to clap you out? How hard that is?
(and not to record you and upload it somewhere).
Who is the clapping actually for?
Can you imagine during a time of critical illness and extreme vulnerability, having to tell staff not to clap you out? How hard that is?
(and not to record you and upload it somewhere).
Who is the clapping actually for?
Unfamiliar things in intensive care can make delirium worse. Delirium can be like torture. Why would we do something as weird and disorientating as clapping someone out of an intensive care unit if their wellbeing was actually our first concern?
It’s hard to imagine being more vulnerable than in intensive care. How can people only just well enough to step down to another ward give genuine consent to something like clapping and being recorded and it being uploaded on the internet? Can you imagine how hard it is to say no?
Surviving critical illness isn’t complete when you’re wheeled out of intensive care. That’s just the start of a road that can be long, hard, and isolating. Setting people off on that as though victorious sets them up for a horrible crash. It totally misunderstands what it’s like.
Survivor guilt is common after intensive care too. I saw people around me die when I was in intensive care. People like me. When I left I didn’t know why I had survived and they hadn’t and had enormous guilt as many people do. The last thing I needed was clapping.
How do you think it is for the families of people who have died in intensive care seeing other patients being clapped out and those videos being shared so many times? What does that say about their loved one? That this is about effort and they didn’t try hard enough? It’s awful.
A basic principle in medical ethics is thinking about benefits and harms to the patient of any intervention we do. For the intervention of clapping, what are the possible health benefits someone might experience from being clapped out and videoed?
Do they justify the harm?
Do they justify the harm?
If the clapping is for staff, to encourage and help them, can we just be honest about that? It’s still an important thing, but why bring patients into it if it might harm them? There are other ways to celebrate good work and good outcomes that don’t cause patient harm.
