Coma, Consciousness and Serious Brain Injury: medical humanities and decision making. (360G-Wellcome-096461_Z_11_Z)

How do clinicians and families make serious medical treatment decisions on behalf of people with profound brain damage, such as those in vegetative and minimally conscious states? What treatment pathways, assumptions, laws and policies frame the options available - and how could these best be challenged, implemented, or improved to ensure science and medicine is deployed to maximize human health and well-being? What insights can be brought to bear by a medical humanities approach to this troubling area of biomedicine/health care ethics? This symposium will bring together around 20 key experts in this field - across disciplinary and professional boundaries- to examine these questions in depth and suggest ways forward. The meeting will strengthen emerging networks and establish dialogue across different perspectives - setting the ground work for future joint research bids, publications, and policy debates. In particular the symposium is designed to lead to a subsequent high-profile event in London and journal special issue devoted to these questions. In parallel to this application I am working with a theatre director and playwright to develop a public-engagement project, and also hope this topic could be a subject for a Wellcome 'Witness Seminar', My initial seeping exercise has ensured that the concerns/expertise of a wide range of medical humanities scholars, policy makers and user groups have been integrated from the outset and that key people in the field are enrolled in this exercise. The initial symposium will work with case study material to review the issue around decision-making, drawing on expertise in the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (designed to frame decision-making for those without capacity) and reflections on the practicalities of clinical dilemmas and family experience, policy making and economics as well as reflections from philosophers and experts in medical history, disability theory, bioethics, literature etc