Introduction
Situations, when people fight for the lives of their seriously ill relatives who have no chance to survive without medical support, are not rare. People hope that a miracle will happen and the patient in a desperate state will suddenly recover, which explains their inability to decide on the termination of the patient’s life. This paper discusses whether it is ethically correct to remove a patient whose brain is dead from life support. The discussed case study is about the attempts of the family of the nine years old girl whose brain is already dead, and she has no chance for improvement to impose the ban on ending her life support. This situation illustrates the moral dilemma because, from the medical point of view, the patient has no chance to recover, and she is already in a vegetative state, but her parents cannot cope with it.
Discussion and Analysis
The ethical principles, in this case, are connected with shared decision-making and patient autonomy. The patient in the discussed case is a child whose brain is dead because of a cancer tumor, and this state is irreversible. As a result, she cannot become autonomous, regardless of all possible treatment methods (Battin & Kious, 2021). The main issue is that her parents, who decide to end life support, do not want to do it, and the hospital makes the decision opposite to their will.
The social and economic consequences of reversing this decision to end the life support of a child with irreversible brain damage are ambiguous. From a financial perspective, the hospital cannot provide another person in a critical state with services because the life support system is not available (Campbell, 2019). From the social point of view, the decision not to end the life support of the patient when their family does not give consent means that the hospital values the will of its clients.
According to the Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, this situation is an example of an ethically challenging situation. It is necessary to provide the patient’s family with sufficient psychological support and guidance to ensure their safety in this case because the end-of-life support of the child is dramatic for them. The security of the patient’s family and empathetic attitude to them is the duty of the nurse in the case when the decision to end the life support of the child is made (ANA, 2015). Therefore, the nurse should have a patient-centered and altruistic position in this situation and emphasize the importance of psychological assistance to the child’s family.
My values and beliefs influence my perception of the discussed situation with the termination of the child’s life. I understand why the girl’s parents fight for several days of life for their daughter on life support because the child’s death is a tragedy. They want to preserve the illusion that the miracle will happen and God will save their daughter’s life, even though there are no chances for it. Therefore, my core ethical beliefs may impact me professionally due to this situation. It might be difficult for me to decide on the termination of the child’s stay on life support even though I understand that their brain is already dead and the miracle would not happen.
Conclusion
Ending the person’s stay on life support is an ethically complicated decision that requires psychological readiness to make this decision. The critical aspect is preparing the patient’s family for this step because people usually cannot cope with the actual death of their relative when they see that the physical body shows signs of activity on life support. This illusion of life makes the situation especially difficult to acknowledge, especially when the patient is the child.
References
ANA. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. American Nurses association.
Battin, M. P., & Kious, B. M. (2021). Ending one’s life in advance. The Hastings Center report, 51(3), 37–47.
Campbell, C. S. (2019). Mortal responsibilities: Bioethics and medical-assisted dying. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 92(4), 733–739. Web.