Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Welcome to the fifth of a six-part series focused on the integration of palliative care into the practice of surgery.   In this episode, we discuss nonbeneficial surgery (and how best to avoid it) as well as care of the imminently dying patient. Nonbeneficial surgery is best defined as surgery that fails to meet the goals of the patient.   As our surgical patients become older and more medically complex, we must be aware of the factors which lead to nonbeneficial surgery – including patient, surrogate, system, and surgeon factors – and how best to approach each of these to avoid causing harm to our patients.  Nonbeneficial surgery not only causes harm to the patient, but can also cause harm to the surgical team, in the form of moral distress/injury.  Focusing on patients’ goals of care can help us to avoid nonbeneficial surgery. One of the benefits of integrating palliative medicine into the practice of surgery is that there is never “nothing left to do.”  By learning how to recognize and then care for the