Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics program

presents

A Montgomery Lecture

With

Kathy Johnson Neely, MD, MA
Medical Director, Northwestern Memorial Hospital Medical Ethics Program
Attending Physician, Palliative Medicine
Northwestern Medicine, Central Region
Associate Professor of Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

ECMO: Clinical Innovation, Uncertainty and Ethics

The deployment of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is rapidly expanding; in its wake, there are extraordinary “saves” alongside ethical uneasiness. Some of the uneasiness is prompted by everyday intensive care medicine – for example, obtaining adequate consent in the context of time-constrained emergencies; determining adequate duration of time-limited trials of a high-burden intervention; and establishing the locus of authority within a shared medical-decision making partnership. Some of the uneasiness relates to innovation with ECMO, the uncertainty of clinic outcomes for the ECMO-rescued patient, and circumstances in which ECMO patients finding themselves on a “bridge to nowhere.” This talk will describe the beginnings of ethical discourse about ECMO, in clinical literature and at NMH.