Original title: Tiredness and the Capacity to Decide: The Example of Maternity Care
Making a choice requires understanding the options and reasoning about them. Research on sleep deprivationNot getting enough sleep. suggests that tiredness can weaken both abilities. The paper argues that this may sometimes affect a patient’s capacity to decide, including during a late intervention in active labour. Checking capacity in some cases, the author argues, is not paternalisticMaking decisions for someone on the assumption that you know what is best for them.; ignoring the effect of tiredness can harm women.
Imagine choosing what to cook after a long day without sleep. You may struggle to understand the options and weigh what each one means. In this paper, that struggle stands for how tiredness may affect a patient’s ability to understand and reason through a healthcare choice; checking whether they can do so is not the same as taking the choice away.
People making choices during maternity care may be exhausted, especially during active labour. If tiredness affects their ability to understand and reason through options, clinicians may need to check decision-making capacity rather than assume it is intact—or dismiss the patient’s choices.
The abstract argues that tiredness can sometimes impair capacity and justify assessment in some cases; it does not establish how often this occurs or give a specific test for capacity. It focuses on maternity care and does not describe particular studies, patient outcomes, or how clinicians should assess tiredness in practice.
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Tiredness and the Capacity to Decide: The Example of Maternity Care — Luke Brunning — Bioethics — doi:10.1111/bioe.70199
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.