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Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.
Today’s tip is about, “Ethics committees in intensive care”. Now, many families in intensive care when they challenge situations in ICU, when ICU says that it’s “in the best interest” for your loved one to have life support withdrawn. And I have yet to find out how it can be in someone’s best interest to have life support withdrawn when they’re in intensive care and fighting for their life. It’s a subjective experience, not an objective experience. And it’s a subjective experience that is unique to a patient and a family.
So, when families in intensive care challenge those situations, ICUs often bring in the ethics committee and say, “Oh, we got to refer this to the ethics committee.” Now I can tell you, after having worked in intensive care for over 20 years in three different countries, from my experience, the ethics committee is just a fuss. You will have a panel of mainly doctors that have done an ethics degree as part of their studies at some point and then they claim that the ethics committee deems them to be fit to make life-or-death decisions.
And from my experience again, after having worked in intensive care for over 20 years in three different countries and having worked for over five years as a nurse unit manager in intensive care, I just felt like the ethics committee is once again, just a fuss. Because it’s just mates covering mates, and everybody says what the hospital wants to hear. How they can manage beds? How they can free up beds? It’s not about being ethical. It’s about managing beds. It’s about managing finances and it’s about managing resources, which includes staff and that therefore, the ethics committee will always come to a conclusion that it’s “in the best interest” for a patient in intensive care to have treatment withdrawn because the ethics committee thinks they have no quality of life in the future. No perceived quality of life. I think that is very important to describe it that way, that it’s no perceived quality of life because it’s just a perception. And your loved one’s perception and your perception as a family are probably very different. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be watching this video.
More importantly now, how can you manage those dynamics? And how can you challenge those dynamics? Our advice is, do not agree to having the ethics committee involved. Keep in mind there, employees of the hospital, the hospital has the agenda, the ICU has the agenda managing beds, managing staff, managing resources, managing finances, and managing power dynamics. So, therefore, you should not agree getting the ethics committee involved. It’s your decision. Ask for policies when the ethics committee should be involved. Ask for policies about end–of-life care decision-making, and you will find those policies will 99% say that nothing can happen without your or your loved one’s consent. So that’s how to manage it.
That’s my quick tip for today.
If you have a loved one in intensive care, go and check out intensivecarehotline.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send us an email to support at intensivecarehotline.com.
Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org.
We also provide medical record reviews for your loved ones while they’re in intensive care or after they’ve left intensive care. We can establish very quickly whether there’s medical negligence and whether intensive care teams are really telling you the truth because most of the time they’re withholding half of the story, and we can help you with what questions you really need to ask.
If you like this video, give it a thumbs up, share it with your friends and families, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, and comment below what you want to see next or what insights and questions you have from this video, and click the notification bell.
Thanks for watching.
This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com and I’ll talk to you in a few days.