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Peer-reviewed article

Who Should Get the Last PICU Bed?

Administrators sometimes face ethical dilemmas about the allocation of institutional resources. One such situation is when elective surgery cases require reserved ICU beds and the ICU is full. Such situations arise frequently in children's…

By John D. LantosJanuary 1, 20141 min readin PEDIATRICS

Administrators sometimes face ethical dilemmas about the allocation of institutional resources. One such situation is when elective surgery cases require reserved ICU beds and the ICU is full. Such situations arise frequently in children's hospitals today. They are sometimes complicated by questions about whether every patient in the ICU belongs there. We present such a situation and responses from Mark Del Becarro, Vice President for Medical Affairs at Seattle Children's Hospital; Aaron Wightman, a nephrology fellow and bioethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital; and Emily Largent, a doctoral student in the joint JD/PhD Program in Health Policy at Harvard University.

Originally published at PEDIATRICS · January 1, 2014.

About the author

John D. Lantos is a pediatrician and bioethicist writing on AI in medicine, neonatal intensive care, and end-of-life decisions. His essays appear in JAMA, JAMA Pediatrics, the Hastings Center Report, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Aeon. Read more about John.

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