“We Don’t Want to Talk About It”: Building Trust for Difficult Decisions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7202/1112295arKeywords:
end-of-life, trust, nonverbal communication, intubation, harm principleLanguage(s):
EnglishAbstract
Clinical ethicists must be attuned to nonverbal cues and the deeper issues they raise, and be willing and agile to change course, if needed, from discussing goals of care to establishing trust. We present a case study where a family and care team disagree about whether a lack of a do-not-resuscitate and do-not-intubate (DNR/DNI) order for a patient with a terminal prognosis is leading to medically justifiable and ethically defensible decisions. An ethicist called a family meeting to discuss the order but determined, after reading the family’s nonverbal cures, that establishing trust was first needed in order to have that discussion, and that such trust could be built by not discussing the order.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Steven Dezort, Amitabha Palmer, Nico Nortjé
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The Canadian Journal of Bioethics applies the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License to all its publications. Authors therefore retain copyright of their publication, e.g., they can reuse their publication, link to it on their home page or institutional website, deposit a PDF in a public repository. However, the authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their publication, so long as the original authors and source are cited.