Death and Dying and Decision Making Process

This research paper discusses the decision-making process involved with patients who are dying in hospitals, nursing homes and other extended care facilities, including the role of institutional review boards or ethics committees and mediation techniques. Although it has its pitfalls, mediation offers a promising alternative to other methods of decision-making in many such cases, especially those in which the patient is incompetent to decide for himself what, if any, further treatment he wants. The cultural and legal framework in which such decisions are often made in the United States militate against prompt and humane outcomes, but nonetheless clarify some of the legal and moral principles involved.

Death, the ultimate bane of all existence, and the process of dying involve great anguish and sometimes present excruciating dilemmas for those involved, first and foremost the patient, who may or may not be aware of what is transpiring, and for others closely involved, including relatives, friends, physicians, nurses and other care givers and the health institutions where the dying process occurs, hospital administrators, special review boards, social workers, bioethicists, representatives of the community, public officials, lawyers and sometimes the courts. As late as 1950, more than half of all dying patients died at home in the presence of intimates. Hafemeister says that "only twenty-five years ago, a d

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have understood the risks of the course of medical treatment being proposed. Various exceptions were grafted onto the informed consent doctrine, including situations involving emergency care, the so-called therapeutic privilege and other situations in which the patient was deemed to have waived his right to withhold his consent. Most of the cases which have arisen in recent decades over the scope of the informed consent doctrine and the right to refuse treatment, in modern parlance the right to die, have involved situations in which the wishes of the patient could not be readily inferred because of his or her condition at the time the provision, withholding or withdrawal of life-sustaining condition became an issue. The first case to achieve nation-wide notoriety was In re Karen Quinlan, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 70 N.J. 10 (1976). Karen Ann Quinlan was a 21 year old female who ingested drugs which caused anoxia, the deprivation of oxygen to the brain and who lapsed into an apparently irremediable coma. Her father, Joe, sued to force a suburban New Jersey hospital to take her off life support systems. The trial court said that since she was not brain-dead because some minimal EEG detected brain activity was present, her respirator c
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 7745
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)

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