Treatment withdrawal from patients in a permanent vegetative state

People in permanent vegetative states (PVS) are being failed by the system, according to researchers at Cardiff University and the University of York who found that some people are being kept alive in PVS for years against their own - and their families' - wishes. Professor Jenny Kitzinger and Professor Celia Kitzinger of the Cardiff-York Coma and Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre have ed 75 family members with catastrophically brain injured relatives and have just published a detailed case study following one individual patient, known as 'Miss S', who was catastrophically brain-injured in 2012. They examined what happened to 'Miss S' as this situation unfolded in real-time, and identified the causes of avoidable delay in the diagnosis of PVS and court applications which finally allowed her to die almost four years later, in June 2016. Published in the Journal of Medical Ethics , the researchers' analysis identified a lack of access to expertise, inadequate follow up, failures in best interest decision-making and confusion about the law. One outcome of these failings is that some patients in a permanent vegetative state are subject to ongoing life-prolonging treatment in spite of evidence that they would not want to be kept alive like this, even when their families are united in opposing treatment and their clinicians do not believe that ongoing treatment is in the patient's best interests.