Do the ICU Nurses Experiences Help in Evolving Medical Futility Guidelines - Research Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages Findings: - when the contents of the literature are viewed through the glasses of the three extracted views, it is found that experiences of nurses form a great volume of the database. Nurse's perception of medical futility is not given due place in decision making by physicians.
Terming the utility behind the medical system and its care oriented activities, as futility is an oxymoron. Treatments that do not fetch results/goals are considered as medical futility. If this can be taken as a rule, then any stage of treatment towards the curative goal can also be rejected as medical futility, because the stages of treatment may not land immediately on the anticipated results. The interactive gap between doctors and patients or their families worsens the situations in many decision-making junctures. Critical situations like withdrawal of life support systems and stoppage of ineffective medical interventions are to be managed in consensus with the patients and families. To achieve this consensus more than five sittings of negotiations are needed at times. Lack of skill in maneuvering the negotiations in the interest of patients on the part of doctors and physicians of entry-level forms the crux of the problem. The term futility is associated with the target-missed. When maintaining the quality of life of the patient is the target, the medical futility makes no sense. Only when life-saving is the issue, medical futility works; that too because of the occurrence of death, which is never in the hands of us. Thus keeping a negative target-- that is death-- as a measure to judge the medical interventions seems quite irrelevant.
During the last decade of the 20th Century, medical futility guidelines began to emerge at different levels in many institutions. The role of the nursing community in ICU and their perception of medical futility were unfortunately given less importance in evolving the guidelines.   ...Download file to see next pagesRead More