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Hospitals Trimming Treatments for Dying

Thu Dec 12, 3:58 AM ET

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Time after time, Peter Clark heard parents at Georgetown University Hospital beg doctors to save the lives of their dying children.

And throughout the neonatal intensive care unit, he heard doctors promise to try. Even if it meant cramming tubes down the children`s throats, cutting open their chests or bombarding their frail bodies with radiation. Even when they knew the treatments couldn`t save them, and would only fill their final days with pain.

Clark spent a year observing medical ethics at the Washington, D.C., hospital. The dilemma he witnessed occurs daily in hospitals nationwide, and a growing number have crafted policies allowing doctors to cease aggressive treatments of terminally ill patients, even when relatives want them to keep fighting.

Within a year, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania plans to adopt ethics guidelines under which doctors could decline to admit patients to an intensive care unit if they have been in a persistent vegetative state for at least three to six months.

In such cases, the hospital would continue to offer care to ease a patients` pain, but wouldn`t take invasive steps like putting the patient on a breathing machine or performing surgery, said Dr. Horace DeLisser, who co-chairs the ethics committee implementing the guidelines....

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