Description

This one hour online presentation will discuss “medical futility,” originally thought to be easy to define, has largely been abandoned, though there remains a sense that the concept has meaning. The current approach to this problem utilizes such terminology as “potentially inappropriate care,” and favors a process and negotiation based strategy, calling upon healthcare ethics consultation expertise.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

1. Review the evolution of the concept of medical futility.
2. Discuss management of conflict in serious illness and end-of-life care.
3. Identify current recommendations around potentially inappropriate care.

Target Audience

This program is intended for Physicians and other clinical staff at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Faculty

Nicholas Sadovnikoff, MD
Co-Director, Surgical Intensive Care Unit
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
Anesthesia and Pain Management, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Dr. Nicholas Sadovnikoff is a graduate of Amherst College and Brown University Medical School. He has been on the Thoracic Anesthesia and Critical Care Anesthesia faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 1998. Board-certified in Internal Medicine, Critical Care Medicine and Anesthesiology, he has been the Co-Director of the Surgical ICUs since 2002. In 2004, he founded the BWH Fellowship in Anesthesiology Critical Care and remains its program director. He divides his clinical time between the operating rooms and the surgical intensive care units. His major area of academic interest resides in Medical Ethics, and he completed the Fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School in 2008-9. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the BWH Ethics Committee, is an active member of the Ethics Consultation Service, and recently achieved certification in Healthcare Ethics Consultation (HEC-C). He sits on several committees in the American Society of Anesthesiologists, including the Committee on Ethics and the Committee on Critical Care. His major areas of interest include advance care planning and end-of-life care, ethics of organ donation and transplantation, and informed consent and surrogate decision-making.