Advance directives give much-needed assurance and peace of mind by allowing individuals to make decisions about their healthcare in advance. They also offer some security to healthcare practitioners who may face family members with opposing viewpoints on what is best for their relatives. The most morally troubling situations are directives that expressly prohibit the delivery of life-prolonging treatments such as resuscitation or intubation with artificial ventilation.
Certain situations require health personnel to override patients’ advance directives, which are usually done deliberately and willfully in the patient’s interests. Banja and Sumler (2019) discuss the Weisman and Alicea cases, contradictory examples of medical workers overriding patients’ advance directives. In the first case, Beatrice Weisman was diagnosed with cardiac arrest after having a major stroke a couple of months before. Being her medical representative, her husband signed a Medical Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment. It stated that if his wife’s heart failed, she should be allowed to die. Under the State’s law, “giving life is not an injury” however, doctors were suited for causing emotional distress and assault after performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (Banja and Sumler, 2019). In the second case, 91-year-old Busilla Stevenson was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and kidney failure. By the time she was admitted to the hospital, Stevenson had a clause she did not want her life extended if her condition was terminal and irreversible. Therefore, her granddaughter, who was appointed as her medical agent, informed the personnel that she could not be renewed.
Analyzing these two cases, the most disputed component of the hypothetical instance is precisely what the Weisman-Alecia did not consider: that the patient’s rejection of resuscitation may be illegal. From a legal point of view, no court has yet awarded damages to plaintiffs who claim that their loved one suffered due to a successful life-prolonging intervention. Patients and surrogates make the ethical argument that if people have the freedom to refuse or cease medical treatments based on their best interests, they also have the right to seek those same therapies. Many of the desired procedures, according to doctors, are both onerous for patients and medically ineffective since they fail to accomplish the anticipated physiological impact and result in a misallocation of medical resources. Even though delivering these therapies might jeopardize physicians’ professional ethics, many think they are obligated to comply with the patient’s or surrogate’s requests because they believe society has required their provision unless there is an agreement to withhold them.
Reference
Banja, J., & Sumler, M. (2019). Overriding advance directives: a 20-year legal and ethical overview. Journal of healthcare risk management, 39(2), 11-18.