Who should get the last PICU bed?
Administrators sometimes face ethical dilemmas about the allocation of institutional resources. One such situation is when elective surgery cases require reserved ICU beds and the ICU is full. Such situations arise frequently in children's hospitals today. They are sometimes complicated by questions about whether every patient in the ICU belongs there. We present such a situation and responses from Mark Del Becarro, Vice President for Medical Affairs at Seattle Children's Hospital; Aaron Wightman, a nephrology fellow and bioethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital; and Emily Largent, a doctoral student in the joint JD/PhD Program in Health Policy at Harvard University.
Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington; Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics and.
Aaron
A
Wightman
Harvard University PhD Program in Health Policy, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and.
Emily
E
Largent
Department of Pediatrics, Seattle Children's Hospital, Seattle, Washington;
Mark
M
Del Beccaro
Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, Missouri jlantos@cmh.edu.
John D
JD
Lantos
D002648:Child; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D015276:Health Care Rationing / Q000941:ethics; D006297:Health Services Accessibility / Q000941:ethics* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006776:Hospitals, Pediatric; D006801:Humans; D015278:Intensive Care Units, Pediatric / Q000941:ethics* / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D018447:Medical Futility; D020380:Needs Assessment / Q000941:ethics*; D040841:Resource Allocation / Q000941:ethics*; D014861:Washington
ethics; futility; justice; rationing; resource allocation