Balancing Legitimate Critical-Care Interests: Setting Defensible Care Limits Through Policy Development

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold.