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"We want everything done"

Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, University of Sydney, Australia

Correspondence to:
Jonathan Gillis, Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Locked Bag 4001, Westmead NSW 2145, Sydney, Australia; jong@chw.edu.au

Accepted for publication 15 June 2007

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Despite a great deal of effort and many articles addressing the end-of-life care of children and adults in intensive care units,^{1 2} paediatricians continue to be confronted by parents wanting "everything done". Such an appeal is often construed by nursing and medical staff as an unreasonable demand and generates emotion and resentment in all parties. Indeed discussion of end-of-life care of children in intensive care is now so coloured by such experiences that it is dominated by words of negativity such as failure, futility, withdrawing and withholding. The grand tradition of paediatric medicine and nursing, however, is that of positive caring for children and families in just these circumstances; in the words of William Osler: "Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is laid".³ It is in this context that I would suggest that there needs to be a reframing of the way we talk about and understand . . . [Full text of this article]