The Hastings Center

The Hastings Center has convened a three-year project in 2007 that will produce a revised, updated, and expanded version of an historic Center publication: Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying (1987). 
The project will research and describe the practices, policies, and other systems that support communications and decision making and promote access to palliative care, hospice care, and other services for clinicians, policymakers, and experts responsible for providing, regulating, or improving end of life care, as well as journalists, scholars, dying patients and their families.
The Guidelines project working group held a plenary meeting in New York City on January 22-23, 2007.  On July 23-24, 2007, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago hosted a research consultation where project leaders met with representatives of disability communities nationwide to explore issues of disability relevant to end of life care.  The project’s leaders are now drafting text, planning further consultations, and exploring publication and dissemination options that will promote awareness and use of the new guidelines by professionals and the public. 
This project is co-funded by the Donaghue Foundation and the Sussman Charitable Trust.

To learn more about The Hastings Center project, go to www.thehastingscenter.org/research/guidelines-end-of-life-care.asp.