The patient in the case study from your informed consent dialogue loses decision-making capacity and is no longer able to participate in making care decisions for themself (if your patient was a minor whose parents were making decisions, for this assignment your patient is an adult). What happens next is unusual. Unrelated to the medical condition in your dialogue, the patient develops a severe headache and confusion. Their condition proceeds rather quickly to a loss of consciousness and they are rushed to an emergency room in New York State. In the emergency department, a CT scan reveals a hemorrhagic stroke. The neurology team recommends an emergency craniotomy to stop the bleeding and relieve the pressure in the brain.

In this essay you are asked to address three questions:

1. Who should make the decision regarding whether to proceed with the emergency craniotomy for your patient? Why?

2. What standard of surrogate decision-making should be used in this case. Why?

3. What should the decision be? Why?

To answer these questions, you should use the basic principles of surrogate decision-

To answer these questions, you should use the basic principles of surrogate decision-making as explained in the readings assigned to support our 10/20/22 discussion of surrogate decision-making, especially

(a) The 2012 article by Thad Pope, Legal Fundamentals of Surrogate Decision Making, (Chest 141(4), 1071-1081); and

(b) The requirements of the NYS Family Health Care Decisions Act (FHCDA) as explained in our discussion and in the NYSBA Family Health Care Decisions Act

Resource Center.