This customizable document, Withholding and Withdrawing Life Support, is taken from MCN Healthcare’s Home Care Corporate Compliance Manual. For more than 20 years, MCN has been the health care industry’s leading provider of policy and procedure templates, forms, competencies and other compliance tools.

Health care organizations around the world utilize MCN’s compliant ready templates and workflow process tools to help them meet the latest changes in regulations and standards.

Here is some sample content from Withholding and Withdrawing Life Support:

	POLICY: Organization staff members will not actively withhold, remove, discontinue or otherwise disable life support or life-sustaining equipment or treatment prior to death. Withholding Life Support: Advance Directives established by a patient will be honored. Withdrawing Life Support: In the event that a patient is currently utilizing life-sustaining equipment/treatments and the patient is legally competent, or his/her legal surrogate determines that maximum medical benefit has been reached and further treatment places an undue burden on the patient, the treatments and/or equipment...
Second excerpt:
	...only if specific criteria are met. PROCEDURE: Withholding and withdrawing life support is only permissible when all of the following criteria have been met: Presence of a signed, written order by the primary physician to withhold/withdraw life support; Physical presence of the patient's primary physician when life support is withdrawn; Discontinuance poses no violation of local, state or federal law; The organization's Ethics Committee has discussed and approved the patient's...