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Multi-Professional Recommendations for Access and Utilization of Critical Care Services: Towards Consistency in Practice and Ethical Decision-Making Processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Laura Hawryluck ,
Redouane Bouali  and
Nathalie Danjoux Meth
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Extract

The ethics sections of Critical Care Societies have issued position statements and proposed a variety of position papers and policies describing the appropriate use of critical care services. These policies describe the goals of critical care provision — to support a patient through an acute, potentially reversible, life-threatening illness — and provide broad guidance on physiological and hemodynamic criteria that require the specialized care of an ICU environment. In recent years, many critical care professionals have, however, reported providing care they felt was inappropriate or futile even though most felt they should not have done so. Futile care encompasses treatments that will not work or treatments that have no chance of providing any benefit. ICU teams define care as inappropriate when it fails to restore a person to an awareness of self, and an ability to interact with their environment particularly when a lot of critical care resources are required. When patients experience significant amounts of pain and suffering, such care seems even more inappropriate.

Type
Independent
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 254 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2011

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