The relationship between quality and sanctity of life in medical futility decisions for terminally ill children in England and Wales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medical progress offers opportunities to save and prolong lives, but with these come ever more excruciating decisions on when to withdraw or withhold invasive medical treatments for terminally ill young children. Parents and clinicians normally need to agree on the child’s medical plan; however, if intractable disagreements among the parties occur, the final decision is remitted to the Family Court in the UK as in most countries around the world. The aim of this paper is to analyse the factors that define medical treatments as futile and the role played by the principles (variously understood) of quality-of-life and sanctity-of-life in the decision-making process both at the juridical and medical level. The paper will analyse court decisions and the academic literature in an attempt to shed more light on these pressing and multifaceted issues. It will then be argued that the interdependence of these factors is essential for making informed and unbiased decisions about the suspension or otherwise of life-sustaining treatments in terminally ill children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.115 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".