Hospital ethics panel discusses end of life

The gray areas of end-of-life issues were brought into the light Tuesday by the recently formed ethics committee at Whitman Hospital and Medical Center.

A group of 16 people, mostly hospital staff and some citizens at large, dug into in-depth conversation on quality of life issues.

“Your quality of life may not be the same as someone else’s,” said Denise Fowler, chief clinical officer at the hospital.

This ethics panel was formed in the spring when the hospital decided it needed a sounding board for ethical issues.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the panel was processing a chapter from Clinical Ethics, a book that spells out the complications surrounding end-of-life care.

“If this is something we are going to advocate and preach, we should be the ones putting it in practice at first,” said Cherry Alice Van Tine, a member of the Whitman Hospital board and also a nurse with Whitman Medical Group.

Sara DeLong, St. John, said she wanted to join the panel because she has always been an advocate for end-of-life issues.

“We all need to get educated on, ‘What are the laws?’” she said in a later interview with the Gazette.

Staying up to date on the ever-changing state and national laws related to end-of-life care is important to her, she added.

DeLong shared an instance in which a relative on their deathbed had previously indicated they did not want to be resuscitated once their heart monitor was flat-lining.

The physician, DeLong said, kept insisting they could bring the patient back, an argument Delong believed was clearly out of bounds.

“This was a crucial time for us,” she said, adding the family didn’t need that delay. “In my eyes, those people are supposed to be there to comfort you to make the final moments as comfortable and easy as possible,” she said.

Fowler agreed with her, pointing out the physician should have respected the patient’s previous requests.

Both Fowler and Van Tine said this lack of education is one more reason physicians, staff and the public need to be educated about patient’s rights.

Pastor Don Moore mentioned he had presided over several funerals since the panel’s last meeting and the information he was gaining from the book and panel had helped him.

A social worker from Whitman Hospital, Shana Cathey, took a week-long seminar in Seattle to learn about ethics issues.

Cathey shared some tips from her trip to the seminar, such as hospital staff should make sure their questions for the ethics panel are very clear. She added that members of an ethics panel are cautioned to approach their decision-making as ethicists and not from the standpoint of their own profession.

“You take that hat off. You are an ethicist,” Cathey said.