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

NCT02020473 | Completed

• 1 other identifier: 4-2012-0858
• Study Type: observational
• Target: 348
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

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.

Conditions

Death Occurring in Intensive Care Units

Keywords

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

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• Signing of informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support

  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consents for WLS included main family members who signed the WLS and type of the life support modalities withheld or withdrawn.

  1 year after ICU admission

Study Arms (2)

WLS group

patients with informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support

non-WLS group

patients without informed consents for withholding/withdrawing life support

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: Up to 92 Years
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: No
• Age Groups: Child (0-17), Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)
• Sampling Method: Non-Probability Sample

Study Population

patients who died from January 2012 to December 2012 in the surgical or medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU)

You may qualify if:

• 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.

You may not qualify if:

• Patients diagnosed with brain death

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Yonsei University: lead

Study Sites (1)

Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Chief of ICUs, Severance Hospital, Yonsei University Health System

Seoul, 120-752, South Korea

Location

Study Design

• Study Type: observational
• Observational Model: COHORT
• Time Perspective: RETROSPECTIVE
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: SPONSOR

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: December 12, 2013
• First Posted: December 25, 2013
• Study Start: February 1, 2013
• Primary Completion: December 1, 2013
• Study Completion: December 1, 2013
• Last Updated: December 25, 2013

Record last verified: 2013-12

Locations

KR (1)