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Clinical Trials/NCT02020473
NCT02020473CompletedNot Applicable

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

Yonsei University1 site in 1 country348 target enrollmentStarted: February 2013Last updated:
Conditions

Trial Snapshot

Phase
Not Applicable
Status
Completed
Enrollment
348
Locations
1
Primary Endpoint
Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support

Study Overview

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.

Study Design

Study Type
Observational
Observational Model
Cohort
Time Perspective
Retrospective

Eligibility Criteria

Ages
— to 92 Years (Child, Adult, Older Adult)
Sex
All
Accepts Healthy Volunteers
No

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.

Exclusion Criteria

  • Patients diagnosed with brain death

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support

Time Frame: 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.

Secondary Outcomes

No secondary outcomes reported

Investigators

Sponsor Class
Other
Responsible Party
Sponsor

Study Sites (1)

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