Acute and Critical Care

Sun Suk Ryu

1 Article

Ethics
The Current Status of Medical Decision-Making for Dying Patients in a Medical Intensive Care Unit: A Single-Center Study: Kyunghwa Shin, Jeong Ha Mok, Sang Hee Lee, Eun Jung Kim, Na Ri Seok, Sun Suk Ryu, Myoung Nam Ha, Kwangha Lee; Korean J Crit Care Med. 2014;29(3):160-165. Published online August 31, 2014; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4266/kjccm.2014.29.3.160

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BACKGROUND
Many terminally ill patients die while receiving life-sustaining treatment. Recently, the discussion of life-sustaining treatment in intensive care units (ICUs) has increased. This study is aimed to evaluate the current status of medical decision-making for dying patients.
METHODS
The medical records of patients who had died in the medical ICU from March 2011 to February 2012 were reviewed retrospectively.
RESULTS
Eighty-nine patients were enrolled. Their mean age was 65.8 +/- 13.3 years and 73.0% were male. The most common diagnosis was acute respiratory failure, and the most common comorbidity was hemato-oncologic malignancy. Withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment including do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders was discussed for 64 (71.9%) patients. In almost all cases, the discussion involved a physician and the patient's family. No patient wrote advance directives themselves before ICU admission. Of the patients for whom withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment was discussed, the decisions were recorded in formal consent documents in 36 (56.3%) cases, while 28 (43.7%) cases involved verbal consent. In patients granting verbal consent, death within one day of the consent was more common than in those with formal document consent (85.7% vs. 61.1%, p < 0.05). The most common demand was a DNR order. Patients died 2.7 +/- 1.0 days after the decision for removal of life-sustaining treatment.
CONCLUSIONS
The decision-making for life-sustaining treatment of dying patients in the ICU very often involves conflict. There is a general need to heighten our sensitivity on the objective decision-making based on patient autonomy.

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