Dr Noah Boton joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Dr Jeffrey Larnard: “When Should Patients at the End of Life Get Antimicrobials?”
The conventional quality-adjusted life years approach to resource allocation has greater societal value if it is distributed among many rather than concentrated on a few, assuming that severity of illness is the same.
Physicians should take an occupational and environmental history of patients suffering from toxic chemical exposure in the workplace and advise them on ways to minimize further exposure to themselves and their families.
A bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.
A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.