Sheri Fink, M.D., of ProPublica, is reporting that state and federal officials are drawing up guidelines on who would get ventilators should there be a severe flu outbreak, including “procedures under which patients who weren’t improving would be removed from life support with or without permission of their families.”
On Thursday morning, the Institute of Medicine is expected to release guidelines to help planners create standards of care in extreme emergencies, according to Fink.
Many of the draft guidelines, including those drawn up by the Veterans Health Administration, are based in part on a draft plan New York officials posted on a state web site two years ago and subsequently published in an academic journal. The New York protocol, which is still being finalized, also calls for hospitals to withhold ventilators from patients with serious chronic conditions such as kidney failure, cancers that have spread and have a poor prognosis, or “severe, irreversible neurological” conditions that are likely to be deadly.
Update
The IOM has released its report on “Standards of Care During Disaster Situations.”
