Withdrawing care from children: review identifies trigger factors that lead to court cases

Mixed messages from different members of a healthcare team and a failure to acknowledge parents as experts in their own children are among the causes of disagreements that have led to court cases over the withdrawal of life sustaining treatment for critically ill children, a review commissioned by the UK government has found.The review, conducted by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, follows a string of high profile court battles in which parents fought to stop NHS trusts discontinuing treatment that specialists believed was no longer in the child’s best interests. Protestors picketed hospitals and harassed staff, and judges made court orders protecting clinicians’ identities.During the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022 the government undertook to commission a review of the causes of disagreements between parents and doctors. Through a literature review, a call for evidence, surveys, workshops, and interviews, the Nuffield Council team has identified “a range of…
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