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Nearly every hospital has them, and most doctors have seen them, treated them, and agonized over them. They are patients with a slim, if not nonexistent, chance of recovery, who continue to receive intense, invasive, and costly procedures because there is no other clear alternative.
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Patients with severe, irreversible brain injuries present unique ethical challenges to physicians and hospital ethics committees. For patients with no chance of recovering an interactive, conscious state, which treatments are appropriate and which are unjustifiably invasive and pointless?
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VA mandates review of research programs; Partial-birth abortion ban approved by Senate.
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This article contains an excerpt from the ethics guidelines of the American Medical Association (AMA): E-2.037 Medical Futility in End-of-Life Care.
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According to a recent analysis by the Chicago-based American Medical Association (AMA), 18 states are experiencing a medical liability crisis, with residents unable to get needed medical care because physicians there cannot afford insurance premiums for medical malpractice coverage.
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The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is conducting a review of the circumstances leading to a transplant fatality, in which a recipient received a heart-lung transplant from a donor with an incompatible blood type, the network reports.
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Hospitals across the country are taking a hard look at their processes to spot weaknesses similar to those at Duke University Hospital, where a patient died because of a lack of redundancy in the system for matching donated organs.
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Sentinel events like the transplant error at Duke University Hospital in Durham, NC, often can be traced to a simple human failing by one individual, but risk managers look beyond that to ask how the system allowed the error to go undiscovered.
