Evaluation and consideration of the modification proposal about Baby Charlie

Recommendations

Risk

- Healthcare executives must work to ascertain the existence of a process to evaluate the quality of health care rendered.

- Work to render a service that ensures the autonomy and self-determination of patients or guardians served

- Offer healthcare services aligned with available resources, and when resources are narrow, work to entrust the existence of a resource allocation process that considered ethical consequences

- Respect the patients' belief, customs, and practices, aligned with the organization's philosophy.

- Be truthful in all forms of communication, in terms of professional and organizational, and avoid publicizing information that is false, misleading or deceptive.

- Applying short- and long-term evaluations to management decisions impacting both community and society

- Providing prospective patients and guardians with decent, satisfactory, and accurate information, helping them with making enlightened decisions regarding services.

The group recommended that the hospital should have provided Charlie's parents with full disclosure of informed consent. This document would specify the risks and benefits of this experimental nucleoside therapy. They also recommended that the medical staff at the hospital should have informed Charlie's parents that the hospital was unchartered territory. Their recommendations are a start to limiting the legal, financial, hospital or reputation risks. The hospital should have informed Charlie's parents on all factors affecting Charlie's care so that his parents can make an informed decision on Charlie's care. Also, Charlie's parents should have had the choice to take Charlie to another hospital for care if that current hospital wasn't allowing them to know the risks and benefits of the experiment as well as have a choice in his care. The hospital and the court system has entirely too much input in Charlie's care without even allowing his parents to have any say in the decision making. Charlie's parents should have followed their hearts and took him to the U.S. for treatment of their choice once they have learned about the risks and benefits of this experimental nucleoside therapy.