Abstract

Conflicts surrounding the provision of life-sustaining treatment create difficult ethical and interpersonal challenges for providers, patients, and families or other surrogates alike. These conflicts implicate a constellation of ethical concepts, including distributive justice, harms and wrongs to patients, fiduciary obligations to patients, standards for surrogate decision-making, and medical futility. Recently, several critical care societies published a policy statement on conflicts at the end of life, and advocated for a new concept, “potentially inappropriate treatment”. They argued that in some circumstances, after due process, physicians and hospitals should have the authority to...