Humanizing the ICU

The ICU is the last frontier of medical care, a symbol of both its promise and of its limits. Given the huge costs of operating an ICU, it is also an arena for intense debate about physician responsibility towards patients, in the face of growing competition for scarce medical resources.  Rationalizing the use of ICUs and allocating beds to patients more likely to benefit from them has in fact been throwing up challenges for hospital management for over three decades. The biggest of these involves determining when life support should be ended for an ICU patient.   In late 2013,