Informed Consents for Withholding/Withdrawing Life Support in Intensive Care Units

Completed

• Conditions: Death Occurring in Intensive Care Units

• Registration Number: NCT02020473
• Lead Sponsor: Yonsei University

Brief Summary

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.

Detailed Description

Not available

Basic Information
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Recruitment & Eligibility
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Study & Design
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Trial Locations

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2013-02
• Status Verified: 2013-12
• Primary Completion: 2013-12
• Study Completion: 2013-12
• Study First Submitted: 2013-12-12
• Study First Submitted QC: 2013-12-18
• Last Update Submitted: 2013-12-18
• Study First Posted: 2013-12-25
• Last Update Posted: 2013-12-25

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: COMPLETED
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 348

Inclusion Criteria

• 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.

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Exclusion Criteria

• Patients diagnosed with brain death

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Study & Design

• Study Type: OBSERVATIONAL
• Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support	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.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Chief of ICUs, Severance Hospital, Yonsei University Health System; 🇰🇷 Seoul, Korea, Republic of