Seminars in respiratory and critical care medicine
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Semin Respir Crit Care Med · Aug 2012
EditorialThe brave new world revealed: wrestling with reality, rationing, and rationality.
When Dr. Joseph Lynch, editor of Seminars in Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, invited us to organize and edit this topic we-and our contributors-were initially baffled about how we could marry outcomes, ethics, and economics. His perspective as an elder-statesman, who has observed the evolution of critical care medicine over 4 decades, provided perspective as to how these three areas are intimately related and that their synthesis is essential if the US medical system is to best serve our populace as resources become increasingly limited.
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Semin Respir Crit Care Med · Aug 2012
The physician as rationer: uncertainty about the physician's role obligations.
Although the need to ration health care is increasingly accepted, the need for bedside physicians to participate in it is not. There are three common perspectives on physicians' roles in rationing: one is that bedside physicians should advocate fully for their patients and eschew rationing; another is that some rationing is permissible but should be imposed from outside the patient-physician relationship; the third is that bedside physicians should simultaneously advocate for their individual patients and make bedside rationing decisions that incorporate societal interests. The first two conceptualizations are at odds with empirical evidence that physicians do ration at the bedside and the idea that doing so may be a necessary part of efforts to control costs, whereas the third raises difficult ethical questions about the extent of physicians' obligations to advocate maximally for their individual patients.
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Patients, clinicians and policy makers are increasingly interested in measuring and improving the quality of health care at the end of life. The intensive care unit (ICU) is characterized by high mortality and frequent use of life-sustaining treatments, making critical care a natural target for these efforts. Indeed, multiple local and regional quality improvement efforts now specifically target the dying experience for ICU patients, patients at risk for ICU admission, and their families. ⋯ Although these initiatives hold great promise, they also face inherent challenges-it is difficult to measure the quality of end-of-life care, we lack practical targets for affecting quality, and uncertain political climates can often preclude serious discussions about end-of-life care. Moreover, these programs may lead to unintended consequences, potentially negatively impacting the very care they seek to improve. Future innovations surrounding how we measure the quality of end-of-life care and paradigm shifts in the way we think about ICU quality may help us to fully realize the goal of improving the dying process for ICU patients.
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Rationing occurs whenever the demand for a good or service exceeds its supply. Therefore rationing is an inevitable occurrence in medicine and in critical care where the potential demand for effective medical care will exceed supply. Although there are many strategies to allocate medical resources one that is often considered is based on cost-effectiveness. ⋯ The prospect of a pandemic influenza-like infection has stimulated a lot of interest in hypothetical rationing strategies for the intensive care unit, none of which has been tested in actual pandemic scenarios. Given the burden of critical illness and the wide variation in resources a global approach to rationing is untenable. The article concludes with a vision of the future of allocation in critical care.