title: Balancing Legitimate Critical-Care Interests: Setting Defensible Care Limits Through Policy Development.
abstract: Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold.
authors.affiliation: a Dalhousie University.
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kirby
mesh_terms: D000066491:Clinical Decision-Making / Q000941:ethics*; D003422:Critical Care / Q000941:ethics*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000941:ethics*; D006040:Goals; D015276:Health Care Rationing / Q000941:ethics*; D006291:Health Policy / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D011050:Policy Making; D012068:Religion and Medicine; D012935:Social Justice / Q000941:ethics; D014481:United States
keywords: end-of-life issues; ethics committees; health care delivery; health policy