Personalizing Clinician Directiveness to Support Patients and Families in the ICU

First talk is session:

Personalizing clinician directiveness in decision-making supports patients and families by allowing medical interventions to be targeted to the patient’s values, cultural background, clinical status and decision-making preferences.  Dr. Morrison’s talk will present multiple models of decision-making ranging from extremely non-directive to highly directive models, when various models may be most appropriate, and how clinicians can decide which model may be most appropriate in a specific case.    She will argue that personalizing decision-making support is the most ethical approach to working with patients and families in challenging circumstances and that this approach can also minimize clinician moral distress.

Wynne Morrison, MD, MBE, FCCM, is a pediatric intensivist and palliative care physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, past Chair of the SCCM Ethics Committee, co-author of the SCCM shared decision-making policy statement, co-editor of the Pediatrics special issue on shared decision-making, and a prolific author on the subject of decision-making in the pediatric ICU.  Dr. Morrison has decades of experience supporting families through work in critical care, palliative care, and ethics. Her published work in pediatric ethics and decision-making is broadly applicable to working with surrogate decision-makers in the adult ICU as well.