Teaching Intubation Skills Using Newly Deceased Infants-Reply

In Reply.  —We commend Dr Tachakra and colleagues for publicly acknowledging that it is common in their country for physicians and nurses in emergency departments to use newly dead patients to practice intubation and central venous cannulation without family consent. The authors' data on the feelings of participating nurses suggests that practicing procedures on the newly dead without consent can be quite upsetting. It would be of interest to determine how participating nurses might respond if family consent were obtained prior to performing the intubation and central venous cannulation exercises.In general, the staff in a neonatal unit does have more time to develop relationships with families than personnel in emergency departments. However, of the 32 consenting families in our study, 12 infants (38%) died within 10 hours after admission to the neonatal intensive care unit and four (12%) within 2 hours of admission. In five of the 12 instances,