Daniel Jackson was admitted into hospital for a right sided cerebrovascular accident. The impact of this has caused Mr Jackson to develop expressive dysphasia/aphasia, where he is able to understand what is being communicated to him but unable to respond verbally or in writing (Labreche et al. 2016).
Mr Jackson is to be discharged to his mother’s house with a package of supportive care since she refused to have him at home unless he has a Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube. The decision to approve this request would be sensible and PEG tube feeding is also favoured by guidelines (ESPEN 2005). They show that it is more safe, tolerable and simple and offers an improvement in nutritional status and a quality …show more content…
They are important as they clarify key moral issues when applied to ethical problems and aid an ethical and legal decision-making processes in a multi-disciplinary team (MDT). They also have been endorsed as important by moral ethical theories (Hope et al. 2008:8) providing a basis for justification on ethical decisions.
The role of the dietitian in the decision-making process as part of an MDT is to provide information of how Mr Jackson can be nutritionally supported in an ethically agreed way. The dietitian plays an important role, as he needs to be nutritionally supported entrally. The dietitian needs to make an ethically sound decision, as it states in the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) (HCPC 2016) that the expected behaviour is to practice safely and effectively towards service users, using evidence-based clinical reasoning to support the decision-making process, and liaison with an MDT to make a holistic decision. Dietitians should use this to provide a tailored feeding regime to Mr Jackson’s case and monitoring his …show more content…
Research looked into the morbidity and mortality rate of stroke patients who required a PEG tube (Iizuka et al. 2005). Results showed that those patients had an increased risk of medical complications and death. This shows that possibly inserting a PEG tube could be harmful and not ethically appropriate. However, this study did show patients who were discharged to their homes with PEG tubes had a higher survival rate, confirming that the decision is not so harmful and still ethically correct. This evidence has a representative sample to Mr Jackson and high generalisability as stroke patients were the