OAKLAND (CBS SF / AP) --
A nursing home that was to accept brain dead teen Jahi McMath and continue life support measures has now backed out, saying it was not clear if and when Children's Hospital Oakland would perform the necessary tracheotomy and gastric tube procedures to transfer her.
This development comes Friday afternoon, just after the hospital announced it was now willing to facilitate her transfer to a long-term nursing home, but only under certain conditions including those procedures.
A lawyer for Children's Hospital Oakland said in a letter made public that before the hospital will comply with Jahi McMath's family's request to move her,
but needed to speak directly with officials at the nursing home to make sure they understand her condition, "including the fact that Jahi is brain dead" -- and to discuss needed preparations.
Lawyer Douglas Straus also said the Alameda County coroner needs to sign off on the move "since we are dealing with the body of a person who has been declared legally dead."
Now, however, the family is searching for another facility in Southern California.
"Children's Hospital will of course continue to do everything legally and ethically permissible to support the family of Jahi McMath. In that regard, Children's will allow a lawful transfer of Jahi's body in its current state to another location if the family can arrange such a transfer and Children's can legally do so," Straus wrote in the letter.
The letter was sent to the family's lawyer, Christopher Dolan, after he said he was preparing a federal civil rights lawsuit to force the hospital to outfit Jahi with breathing and feeding tubes -- surgical procedures Dolan said she would need to breathe and be fed at the new facility but which the nursing home is not equipped to insert.
The girl's relatives originally announced on Thursday that they had found a nursing home in the San Francisco Bay Area that was willing to care for the girl if she had the tubes. Within hours, the hospital's chief of pediatrics issued a statement saying Children's would not cooperate because it "does not believe that performing surgical procedures on the body of a deceased person is an appropriate medical practice." Friday, the nursing home backed out.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/201...n-jahi-mcmath/