Health Care How Would You Case Study

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Futile medical care is the ongoing provision of medical treatment or care to a patient who does not show any hope of recovery. It is either that his condition is not curable and therefore the treatment that he is receiving is of no benefit. The common examples of these are that a surgeon is performing a surgery on a patient with terminal cancer. Patients who have terminal cancer have gotten the cancer spread all throughout their body. It is only until time that their organs will go into failure and they will pass away. Another example is of keeping brain dead people on life support for other reasons. As it would be expected, this is quite a sensitive area and it would involve arguments with the patient's relatives and friends.

It is understandable that the loved ones do want to do anything they can to keep the patient in front of them and to cure them in whatever means possible. The major argument with futile care is that it only prolongs death and that there is no positive outcome with it. (Appel, 2009) In places where resources are limited, futile care takes away resources from patients who do have a chance of survival. It is true that it's not ethical to deprive a person medical assistance, but it is not also fair to hog up resources that could be used in more hopeful cases.

Question 4: Read over the EMTALA statute to see why the courts have used it to cover the case.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is an act passed by the United State Congress. This act basically requires hospital to give care to anyone who requires emergency healthcare regardless of their legal status, economical condition or their citizenship.

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The hospital that is presented with the patient can switch hospital or discharge the patient under the patient's own consent. They can also move the patient after he or she is stabilized or they can move the patient to a facility where services are better.

This act basically states that the hospital has to do something when the patient arrives in the emergency. Therefore, the hospital could not argue because having trouble breathing was a medical emergency. Using this act, the court ruled in favor of the mother that the hospital has to put the baby on ventilator when she has trouble breathing. This court does not rule out or define as to the prognosis of the case at hand. Due to this reason, the fact that chances of survival of this baby were almost zero did not make any difference to this act.

The act requires for the hospital to stabilize the condition and not to cure the underlying disorder. It should be noted that anencephalic infants are not brain dead because their brain stem is working. This allows for autonomic and voluntary process like breathing keep on functioning. This act also did not have any special clauses for anencephalic infants. Therefore, this act is applied to all of the cases that arrive in the emergency room. Thus, we see here that the hospital services should be provided to anyone who comes in the emergency room. However, if resources are scarce, then technically decisions should be made in favor of the people who have more chances of survival......

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