blog.bioethics.net

7% of Pediatric Hospitals Lacking DCD Policies. Call In the Clinical Ethicists! Wait. We Already Did.

Recent surveys have found that 7% of pediatric hospitals lack a policy regarding the criteria for donating organs after cardiac death, says a recent study published in JAMA, according to Medpage Today. What is perhaps more troubling, according to this research, is among the 93% of hospitals that have policies, there exists a hodgepodge of criteria and policies that fail to address in many cases the key ethical concerns at the heart of the DCD issue.

My favorite finding: 25% of DCD policies in the hospitals surveyed failed to MENTION informed consent. I'm sure they just forgot to write down that slightly important criterion. No big deal, right?

Of course, just because a written policy, per se, does or does not mention a certain issue doesn't mean that something like informed consent doesn't take place. But it does make one more than a little concerned that the hospital in which one's child is being cared for forgot to include one of the central tenets of Western medicine and one of the key aspects of respecting persons and their wishes (even posthumous) in the healthcare setting.

When 25% of hospital ethics committees (who presumably at least help to draft these policies) can forget to mention something as critical as informed consent, one can only wonder: what else did they forget? This study outlines a number of those areas where the variations in policies are quite dramatic. This study highlights the concerns related to not only significant variability in DCD policies but also the quality of hospital ethics committees and their policy formation in pediatric hospitals around the nation.

Summer Johnson, PhD