What difficulties do healthcare professionals face when attempting to deactivate ICDs?
Healthcare professionals face various difficulties when attempting to deactivate ICDs, such as not being able to deactivate out of hours due to lack of staff or magnets, consultants being unavailable to visit dying patients in the community to deactivate the ICDs, excessive time delays due to lack of defined process in the community, unavailability of magnets or insufficient education on how to use magnets, confusion of the size of the magnet needed, and organisational difficulties such as having to make a lot of phone calls in order to access technician support for deactivation. Additionally, many feel that there is no local or national policy or procedures related to ICD deactivation, which makes the process longer and more difficult.