I had the opportunity today to read a very thoughtful article about a meeting of Catholic physicians who are helping their very ill patients to wrestle with hard decisions about whether to utilize palliative care in place of active treatment with mechanical life support. The organization is the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) and the online newsletter article in the section on Physicians Articles is called  “Pathways to Convergence: EXAMINING DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES OF CATHOLICS ON ADVANCE CARE PLANNING, PALLIATIVE CARE, AND END-OF-LIFE CARE IN THE UNITED STATES,” subtitled ” Untangling the Gordian Knot of Language and Attitude about Palliative Care and Advance Care Planning: Pathways to Convergence,”

The article reports on the findings that stemmed from a 2015 initiative in which the Pew Charitable Trusts “gathered a group of six Catholic ethicists who worked in and with the Catholic health ministry from a variety of perspectives. All of them served as resources to help organizations in the ministry remain faithful to and compliant with Catholic teaching. Serving as a kind of steering committee, this initial group sketched out a framework for a project that would look at three main topics in Catholic health care” [including] …”:3. the specific issues and decisions made by patients and families and providers in the setting of living with serious illness and, ultimately, dying from it.”

The article goes on to report that “Pathways to Convergence, a project supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, enabled a broad array of clergy, clinicians, practitioners and ethicists to explore Catholic perspectives on these issues for more than a year. Participants engaged in a series of in-depth conversations on how Catholics accompany the sick and dying, how end-of-life medical decisions are made and what role the church has in promoting its message and vision in the public square. It was acknowledged at the outset that although Catholics share many strongly held views that converge, they also hold divergent views and practices that cause confusion and misunderstanding. The project was established with the hope that, through a respectful exploration of the convergence and divergence of views, participants could recognize a path forward that would enable Catholics to speak more clearly and distinctly about these issues to one another and to others as well. …”

Discussions between physician and patient, or patient and nurse practitioner, about care at end of life are challenging, sensitive, and fraught with the difficulty of accepting certain medical inevitabilities without giving up hope. One’s concept of what constitutes good life at end of life must be explored. Individuals can sign advance directives, and patients or their authorized proxies can confer with physicians about POLST – Physicians Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment — that become part of the medical record both in and out of the hospital. Above all, the issues need to be explored with the team that is important to the patient, which will often include clergy as well as health care personnel and trusted family members.

Call us for advice on personalized advance care senior planning … 732-382-6070

 A post by Linda Ershow-Levenberg, Esq. for Fink Rosner Ershow-Levenberg Blog.

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