Can perioperative futile care be defined?
The estimated cost of the futile care was $2.6 million.
A "comfort care only" procedure should be designed avoiding futile care, venous access and artificial nutrition.
There may be situations when futile care can be appropriate, one doctor says.
But she also sees the excessive and futile care that has become routine.
In 2009 dollars, Dr. Gordon calculated, that amounts to $70 billion a year, much of it spent on futile care that prolongs suffering.
Patients close to death are entering hospitals in "tremendously high numbers," she says, receiving aggressive, expensive and futile care, and dying there instead of in hospice, a less costly and more comfortable alternative.
The price was enormous suffering for them and their loved ones, tremendous expense to society, and a less tangible but profound toll on the morale of staff providing what they knew to be futile care.
Emanuel has studied the fairly sketchy research and concluded that, with the possible exception of hospice care for cancer patients, measures to eliminate futile care in dying patients have not proved to be significant cost-savers.
Switching to Comfort Care While there is no official definition of futile care, Dr. Smith suggests that it represents care that is "very unlikely to help and likely to harm".
Doctors, nurses and other caregivers do not gain anything when we pursue futile care, often in intensive care settings with extremely expensive protocols, because a patient and/or the family "wants everything done".
