Informed consent and living wills

The text of this paper was originally presented to the RCN Cancer Nursing Society Conference which was held in June 1993. It was written in response to a request to cover the topics of informed consent, ethics and the multidisciplinary team and living wills. Clearly, this is an extremely broad range of topics so, in order to introduce some coherence into the paper, the 'Tuma' case is used to connect the themes of cancer nursing, informed consent and working in a multidisciplinary team. The topic of living wills and its parent concept, that of advance directives, constitute a particular aspect of informed consent. These ideas are introduced via two recent legal judgements concerning 'T' and Tony Bland. The focus then moves from legal to moral concerns, ending with a brief critique of the whole idea of living wills.