Informed Consents for Withholding/Withdrawing Life Support in Intensive Care Units
试验速览
- 阶段
- 不适用
- 状态
- 已完成
- 入组人数
- 348
- 试验地点
- 1
- 主要终点
- Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support
研究概览
简要总结
End-of- life care is a major issue in medical ethics with life support technology progress. Intensive care may prolong the dying process in patients who have been unresponsive to the treatment already provided. Withholding or withdrawing of life support (WLS) care was introduced to avoid the suffering of critically ill patients. Decision to WLS is a difficult and affected by several factors including not only disease severity but also ethics, religion, culture, and legal background. In western countries, advance directives had an important role to WLS for dying patients and honor patient autonomy. However, the illegality of advance directives in Korea and Korean culture under Confucianism, requiring children to do the best to treat their parents in the name of filial piety make physicians and family members difficult to WLS in terminally ill patients.
Additionally, WLS in intensive care unit had been usually decided without official documentation before the final legal decision by Supreme Court in Korea. Scanty information exists about end-of-life practices because informed consents of WLS were taken after the legal decision.
Thus, we aimed to investigate the current status of informed consent at the time of decision to WLS and difference between WLS group and non-WLS group in Korea.
研究设计
- 研究类型
- Observational
- 观察模型
- Cohort
- 时间视角
- Retrospective
入排标准
- 年龄范围
- — 至 92 Years(Child, Adult, Older Adult)
- 性别
- All
- 接受健康志愿者
- 否
入选标准
- •patients who died from January 2012 to December 2012 in the surgical or medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Severance Hospital, Yonsei University Health System, in Seoul, Korea.
排除标准
- •Patients diagnosed with brain death
结局指标
主要结局
Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support
时间窗: 1 year after ICU admission
Primary outcome was existence of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support. Data from informed consents for WLS included main family members who signed the WLS and type of the life support modalities withheld or withdrawn.
次要结局
未报告次要终点
