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

Status

Completed

Phases

Unknown

Study type

Observational

Source

ClinicalTrials.gov

Registry ID

NCT02020473

Enrollment

348

Registered

2013-12-25

Start date

2013-02-28

Completion date

2013-12-31

Last updated

2013-12-25

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

Death Occurring in Intensive Care Units

Keywords

Informed consents, Withholding/withdrawing life support (WLS), Intensive care unit (ICU)

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.

Interventions

None listed

Study design

Observational model

COHORT

Time perspective

RETROSPECTIVE

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

ALL

Age

No minimum to 92 Years

Healthy volunteers

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

Design outcomes

Primary

Measure	Time frame	Description
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.

Countries

South Korea

Outcome results