Health knowledge made personal
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Today,s Guardian reports that doctors switched off a Battersea woman's life support machine without her family's permission to save NHS resources, her husband has claimed.  Shun-Yuen Pang, a former British serviceman, asked for his wife Lai-Mei to be kept alive for two more days at Kings College Hospital so that her three sons could have a chance to say a last goodbye. They took the first plane out of Hong Kong when they heard their mother, 58, had been hit by a car on December 22 – but when they arrived she was already dead.Mr Pang, 60, said: “The doctor told me, ‘it’s not you who decides – it’s the hospital. We are turning it off in 30 minutes’. The doctor allegedly said other patients needed the equipment and that NHS resources were overstretched. A hospital spokesman said: “Life support is only removed when senior doctors are certain recovery is not possible, and family members are kept fully informed at each stage of the decision-making process.”
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