The Current Status of Medical Decision-Making for Dying Patients in a Medical Intensive Care Unit: A Single-Center Study

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

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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