Everyday Ethics

 Nearly 25 years ago, gerontologists wrote about what they called “everyday ethics” in the lives of older people. They wanted to move the focus from the dramatic, life-or-death decisions that were the bread and butter of medical ethics, to the more mundane, but far more common concerns affecting elderly individual. These kinds of issues ranged from seemingly trivial concerns that nonetheless affected quality of life, such as the freedom of nursing home residents to decide when to get up or where to sit at breakfast, to medically consequential decisions such as whether to be treated at home or in the hospital. In some cases, older people had strong opinions about what they wanted, but needed help implementing their choices—in ethical lingo, they were “decision-competent,” but did not have “executional autonomy.” In other cases, older people did not have the cognitive capacity to make choices and needed a surrogate to decide on their behalf. 

Everyday ethics never caught the imagination of physicians or of the general public. It just wasn’t as exciting as the momentous decisions about who would get an organ transplant or whether someone could be taken off a ventilator. But the commonplace decisions that have to made each day for frail older individuals collectively have far greater import than the much rarer life-or-death decision. Someone has to decide whether an 85-year-old woman with dementia and difficulty caring for herself will stay in the community or enter a nursing home. Someone has to decide whether a 90-year-old with pneumonia will be treated in her home or in an acute hospital. Someone has to decide whether the 79 year-old with very advanced dementia should enroll in hospice. But the focus of the medical literature, of empirical studies of what actually happens in daily life and theoretical essays about who should make decisions and on what basis, tends to be on the use or withdrawal of technology, of the major symbols of medical treatment. So a new study that purports to look at the role of surrogate decision-makers outside the intensive care unit setting is a welcome reminder that what matters to older people—and what accounts for most of their healthcare utilization—is not just procedures and surgery and machines.

This new study makes the important but not surprising observation that surrogate decision-makers are critically important to older patients. They report that within 48 hours of admission to a hospital, 47% of older adults require that a medical decision be made in which a surrogate participates. In 23% of cases, these decisions are made exclusively by the surrogate. Unfortunately, this study is confined to the acute hospital setting. It still deals with big ticket items—in 57% of cases, the decision in question related to life-sustaining care, principally whether to attempt CPR in the event of a cardiac arrest, and in 49% of cases, the decision related to an operation or procedure. Not only was the study restricted to the hospital, but it included decisions made in the ICU, even though the authors specifically give as the impetus for their work the need to extend the discussion to settings outside the ICU. But at least it is a start. We need to look at the everyday decisions made by surrogates for their aged, frail, or demented family members and examine how they make these decisions, what help they need, and how they could make better decisions, ideally reflecting the values and needs of those they love.