Critical Care Societies Collaborative – Critical Care
View all recommendations from this societyReleased January 28, 2014
Don’t continue life support for patients at high risk for death or severely impaired functional recovery without offering patients and their families the alternative of care focused entirely on comfort.
Patients and their families often value the avoidance of prolonged dependence on life support. However, many of these patients receive aggressive life-sustaining therapies, in part due to clinicians’ failures to elicit patients’ values and goals, and to provide patient-centered recommendations. Routinely engaging high-risk patients and their surrogate decision makers in discussions about the option of foregoing life-sustaining therapies may promote patients’ and families’ values, improve the quality of dying and reduce family distress and bereavement. Even among patients pursuing life-sustaining therapy, initiating palliative care simultaneously with ongoing disease-focused therapy may be beneficial.
These items are provided solely for informational purposes and are not intended as a substitute for consultation with a medical professional. Patients with any specific questions about the items on this list or their individual situation should consult their physician.
How The List Was Created
This document was prepared as an initiative of the Critical Care Societies Collaborative, which includes the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Thoracic Society and the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Each of these four societies was invited to nominate up to three members to join the taskforce. The final taskforce included 10 members representing all four societies and the disciplines of internal medicine, surgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine and critical care nursing. Taskforce members initially proposed 58 items for consideration. The taskforce evaluated each item on five criteria (evidence, prevalence, cost, relevance, innovation), and agreed to narrow the list to 16 items. The taskforce debated the conceptual merits of these 16, and selected nine in which to pursue in-depth evidence reviews and consultations with external content experts. Taskforce members then independently scored each item on a scale from 1-9, rating each item on its overall impact as well as on each of the five criteria. The five items with the best mean overall scores were retained in the “penultimate” list. The taskforce then reviewed and edited the wording of items on the penultimate list, and submitted it to the 4 societies’ executive committees. The executive committees sought feedback from additional experts in the field, debated the items, and provided written comments to the taskforce. The taskforce deliberated and incorporated these suggestions where appropriate to create the final list, resolving any conflicts through discussion. All four societies endorsed the final list.
Members of the taskforce were: Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD (Chair), Deborah Becker, PhD, RN, J. Randall Curtis, MD, MPH, Robert Fowler, MD, Robert Hyzy, MD, Jeremy M. Kahn, MD, MSc, Lewis Kaplan, MD, Nishi Rawat, MD, Curtis Sessler, MD and Hannah Wunsch, MD, MSc.
The disclosure and conflict of interest policies for the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, American College of Chest Physicians, the American Thoracic Society and the Society of Critical Care Medicine can be found at www.accn.org, www.chestnet.org,www.thoracic.org and www.sccm.org respectively.
Sources
Fields MJ, Cassel CK. Approaching death, improving care at the end of life. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press; 1997. 437 p.
Angus DC, Barnato AE, Linde-Zwirble WT, Weissfeld LA, Watson RS, Rickert T, Rubenfeld GD; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ICU End-Of-Life Peer Group. Use of intensive care at the end of life in the United States:an epidemiologic study. Crit Care Med. 2004;32(3):638–43.
Curtis JR, Engelberg RA, Wenrich MD, Shannon SE, Treece PD, Rubenfeld GD. Missed opportunities during family conferences about end-of-life care in the intensive care unit. Amer J Respir Crit Care Med. 2005;171:844–9.
Gries CJ, Engelberg RA, Kross EK, Zatzick D, Nielsen EL, Downey L, Curtis JR. Predictors of symptoms of posttraumatic stress and depression in family members after patient death in the ICU. Chest. 2010;137(2):280–7.
