Doctors and Nurses
Physicians often offer incomplete choices for end-of-life care to families of intensive care unit patients, a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found.
The researchers found that families with less education were given fewer choices for end-of-life care than more educated families. In addition, the authors found that end-of-life care patients' family members were more satisfied with the care when they were given higher levels of shared decision making.
The authors concluded that shared decision making is an important area for quality improvement in the ICU (White et al., Archives of Internal Medicine, 3/12).