Hospital ethics panels help families handle end-of-life situations
Cathy Lynn Grossman Gannett
November 03, 2009 12:42 PM

An infant is born with no functioning brain. A teen is ravaged in a car wreck. A 90-year-old with dementia and pneumonia lies unconscious in intensive care.

Medical and moral decisions must be made. But there's no written directive for guidance. Family and physicians disagree. What now?

Every day, in a hospital somewhere in the U.S., a group of strangers - the hospital ethics committee - is called in to help people make the choices of a lifetime.

While Congress wrangles over health care reform, these committees or consultants have worked in U.S. hospitals for nearly two decades.

They are typically volunteers: physicians, nurses, chaplains, social workers, ethicists and medical school professors, who mediate among facts, emotions, hope and fantasy.

"Culture and religion inform every decision about health, illness, disease and care, about true caring, about who can live, about the measure of quality in a life, about when suffering begins and how it ends. We bring our full selves to every bedside," says Dawn Seery, head of the five-hospital Methodist Healthcare System in San Antonio.

'Death denial'

They tackle questions of whether to begin or continue aggressive treatments or artificial life support, such as ventilators or feeding tubes. Only 25 percent of Americans have advance directives spelling out their values and choices for the day "when I'm not myself anymore and never will be again," Seery says.

Consider the often-heard demand that doctors "do everything!" to keep a patient alive.