Include Objective Quality-of-Life Assessments When Making Treatment Decisions With Patients Possessing Covert Awareness

摘要

The discovery of covert awareness in patients with limited behavioral responsiveness reveals an ethical imperative to alleviate suffering, and thus increases the importance of decisions regarding medical and nursing care. Decision making for these patients will be mediated if not predominated by a surrogate and health care teams with limited patient feedback. Therefore, caretakers will require ready and reliable quality of life (QOL) information in order to make informed judgments on the patient's behalf. We extend the discussion by Peterson and colleagues (2013) to briefly speculate on the promise of objectively evaluating QOL in patients with covert awareness.