On Monday, Anne Linehan posted about Andrea Clark, the most recent Houston hospital patient to run up against the state’s futile-care law. Right Wing News had previously posted on the topic (and continues to follow the story). Local bloggers followed suit, and KHOU-11 ran early local coverage of the matter.
Today, the local Hearst daily decided to cover the matter, with reporter Todd Ackerman explaining the following:
Hoping to defuse the latest local controversy involving Texas’ futile-care law, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital agreed Thursday to transfer a severely ill heart patient to a facility in suburban Chicago.
The agreement, announced three days before the hospital planned to take Andrea Clark off life support, comes amid a growing movement to reform the Texas law, which allows hospitals to discontinue terminal patients’ life-sustaining care as long as their ethics committee determines the case is futile and gives the patient’s family 10 days notice to find another facility.
[snip]
The agreement to transfer Clark today to Glenshire Nursing & Rehab Centre, a long-term acute-care facility in Richton Park, Ill., came Thursday evening, at the conclusion of lengthy negotiations between St. Luke’s and Clark’s family. The family had preferred she stay in Texas and wanted St. Luke’s to extend the 10-day deadline so they could continue searching for another in-state facility. In the end, her sister, Lanore Dixon, said the family felt it had no other options.
St. Luke’s will pay the transfer costs, even though the law says the patient’s family is responsible for such payment. Ward says she was told they will amount to nearly $15,000.
“We are delighted that this issue has been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties,” said Rosemary Luquire, senior vice president and chief quality officer for the St. Luke’s Episcopal Health Care System. Another senior official said the hospital’s position had been about “compassion and the best interests of the patient.”
Clark, 54, a “blue baby” upon whom Drs. Michael E. DeBakey and Denton Cooley performed pioneering open-heart surgery on the then new heart-lung machine in the late 1950s, has been at St. Luke’s since November.
Her condition deteriorated after open-heart surgery in January and bleeding in the brain this month, Dixon said.
The conflict erupted April 19, when Dr. Robert Carpenter Jr., chairman of St. Luke’s ethics committee, wrote Ward and Dixon to say that the committee had unanimously agreed with Clark’s attending physician that “the life-sustaining treatment currently being provided to your sister is inappropriate and should be discontinued.”
This is great news for Andrea Clark and her family, although it is unfortunate that Clark must leave the state to continue to receive life-sustaining medical treatment.
The Chronicle article notes the role that the internet played in drawing attention to the St. Luke’s decision as well as the state law behind it:
“There may be an agreement, but the real story is a law that allows physicians and ethics committees to make life-and-death decisions based on what they perceive a patient’s quality of life to be,” said Jerri Ward, the lawyer representing Clark. “It’s unfortunate Texas has become ground-zero for this futile-care movement.”
Even without Ward taking the matter to court, Clark’s case galvanized hundreds of supporters around the country. Online forums and blogs aired details of her sister’s campaign to stop St. Luke’s from pulling the plug and opponents of the plan flooded the hospital with outraged phone calls. A small protest was held outside St. Luke’s last weekend.
Blogs are never going to displace mainstream media and basic journalism, but one function that blogs (posts and the ensuing conversation) do perform is to act as shadow editors — to push stories that aren’t getting attention, to push angles that aren’t getting attention, to illustrate biases and other mistakes in reporting, and the like. In this instance, there’s not much doubt that blogs helped this story to bubble up and get the attention of mainstream press.
As for the issue itself, we’ve been discussing it for a while in our forum (see the RELATED links at the end), with a healthy back-and-forth on both the pros and cons of the Texas law. Some of us find the following news heartening:
The case comes a year after three high-profile cases in Houston. In one, Texas Children’s Hospital removed from life support a 6-month-old boy with a fatal form of dwarfism. In another, courtroom-wrangling by the lawyer of a 68-year-old man in a persistent vegetative state extended the 10-day deadline and gave the family time to find another facility, where he died four months later. And in the last, a 6-month-old girl with leukemia died five days before Memorial Hermann Children’s Hospital planned to unplug her respirator.
Those cases and others — Ward filed a petition Thursday in Austin in another such case — prompted the reassessment going on in the capital, said Greg Hooser, an attorney and consultant leading the meetings. He said the reforms likely will include an extension of the 10-day notification period.
Dr. William Winslade, a prominent bioethicist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said the reforms should include a more impartial process.
“One problem with the law is that it gives all the bargaining power to the hospital and doctors,” Winslade said. “I think it would be better if an external mediator looked at cases. I’m sympathetic to hospitals on these issues, but I’ve talked to too many families who feel browbeaten and without recourse.”
Given how this law has played out in a number of instances and the controversy it has generated, surely nobody can object to a reassessment.
UPDATE: Right Wing News is now reporting that St. Luke’s has nixed the deal to transfer Clark.
UPDATE 2 (04-29-2006): The Chronicle reports that the Illinois facility nixed the deal.
UPDATE 3 (04-29-2006): Wesley Smith offers some thoughts on the futile-care law at play here.
RELATED (from the archives): Help Andrea Clarke, Hospital to remove Houston man from life support, Life and death in Houston, Feeling our way through the end of life.
BLOGVERSATION: Cvstos Fidei, TBIFOC.
