During a patient care team meeting, the hospice medical director explained that he’d broken one of his rules.

My distant impression of the doctor—physically distant because of where he and I sit in the meetings and professionally distant since he cares for the patients in their dying while I support grieving families after death—is that rules are critical values for the way he lives his life.

However, the soft-spoken physician felt he had to break a rule. Instead of providing key information about the disease process, and the options for comfort care so the patient could make choices about the next steps, the doctor bluntly told a patient that he must be transferred from his residence to our in-patient hospice home. Now! There, the patient would have a better level of care for his needs. Moving was not his choice; it was the doctor’s demand.

The patient died before the next sunrise. He died with the sole member of his local family at bedside. For weeks, his dying had been lonely, problematic, and anguished. In his last hours, dying became peaceful. The doctor had used good judgment. But the doctor had also wrestled over “breaking” a personal, essential rule: whenever possible, let a patient take the lead in making an informed decision. Read More →

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