Article Text
Abstract
Objectives—To assess whether UK and US health care professionals share the views of medical ethicists about medical futility, withdrawing/withholding treatment, ordinary/extraordinary interventions, and the doctrine of double effect
Design, subjects and setting–A 138-item attitudinal questionnaire completed by 469 UK nurses studying the Open University course on “Death and Dying” was compared with a similar questionnaire administered to 759 US nurses and 687 US doctors taking the Hastings Center course on “Decisions near the End of Life”.
Results–Practitioners accept the relevance of concepts widely disparaged by bioethicists: double effect, medical futility, and the distinctions between heroic/ordinary interventions and withholding/ withdrawing treatment. Within the UK nurses' group a “rationalist” axis of respondents who describe themselves as having “no religion” are closer to the bioethics consensus on withholding and withdrawing treatment.
Conclusions—Professionals' beliefs differ substantially from the recommendations of their professional bodies and from majority opinion in bioethics. Bioethicists should be cautious about assuming that their opinions will be readily accepted by practitioners.
- Death and dying
- withdrawal of care
- refusal of treatment
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
-
Donna L Dickenson is Leverhulme Reader in Medical Ethics and Law, Imperial College School of Medicine, London.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Does the doctrine of double effect apply to the prescription of barbiturates? Syme vs the Medical Board of Australia
- Australian pharmacists’ perspectives on physician-assisted suicide (PAS): thematic analysis of semistructured interviews
- Terminal sedation and the “imminence condition”
- End-of-life decisions in medical practice: a survey of doctors in Victoria (Australia)
- Can facilitated aid in dying be permitted by ‘double effect’? Some reflections from a recent New Zealand case
- Why the term ‘persistent therapy’ is not worse than the term ‘medical futility’
- End of life decision-making in neonatal care
- Perceptions of patients on the utility or futility of end-of-life treatment
- Identifying futility in a paediatric critical care setting: a prospective observational study
- Medical futility at the end of life: the perspectives of intensive care and palliative care clinicians