Legal Definitions - life-sustaining procedure

A life-sustaining procedure refers to any medical intervention that employs artificial equipment or techniques to maintain a person's essential bodily functions when those functions are severely impaired or have ceased. The main goal of such a procedure is to keep the individual alive by supporting vital systems like breathing, circulation, or nutrition, rather than to cure the underlying disease or injury.

Here are some examples:

• Imagine an elderly patient who suffers a severe stroke and can no longer breathe independently. They are placed on a mechanical ventilator, a machine that breathes for them by pushing air into their lungs. This ventilator is a life-sustaining procedure because it uses artificial means to substitute a vital function (breathing), primarily to postpone death, as the underlying brain damage is not being cured by the machine itself.

• Consider a person in an advanced stage of a degenerative neurological disease who has lost the ability to swallow food or liquids safely. A feeding tube is surgically inserted to deliver nutrition and hydration directly into their stomach or intestines. This artificial feeding is a life-sustaining procedure because it uses artificial means (the tube and administered nutrients) to sustain vital functions (nutrition and hydration), preventing starvation and dehydration, thereby postponing death.

• A patient with end-stage kidney disease, whose kidneys have completely failed, undergoes regular dialysis treatments. During dialysis, a machine filters waste products and excess fluid from their blood, performing the function that healthy kidneys would normally do. This dialysis is a life-sustaining procedure as it uses artificial means (the dialysis machine) to substitute a vital bodily function (kidney filtration), allowing the patient to continue living despite their kidney failure.