Objective: Recommendations for making and implementing decisions to forgo life-sustaining therapy in intensive care units have been developed in the United States, but the extent that they are realized in practice has yet to be measured.
Design: Prospective, multicenter, 4-wk study. For each patient with an implemented decision to forgo life-sustaining therapy, the deliberation and decision implementation procedures were recorded.
Setting: French intensive care units.
Patients: All consecutive patients admitted to 26 French intensive care units.
Interventions: None.
Measurements and main results: Of 1,009 patients admitted, 208 died in the intensive care unit. A decision to forgo life-sustaining therapy was implemented in 105 patients. The number of supportive treatments forgone was 2.3 +/- 1.7 per patient. Decisions to forgo sustaining therapy were preceded by 3.5 +/- 2.5 deliberation sessions. Proxies were informed of the deliberations in 62 (59.1%) cases but participated in only 18 (17.1%) decisions. The patient's perception of his or her quality of life was rarely evaluated (11.5%), and only rarely did the decision involve evaluating the patient's wishes (7.6%), the patient's religious values (7.6%), or the cost of treatment (7.6%). Factors most frequently evaluated were medical team advice (95.3%), predicted reversibility of acute disease (90.5%), underlying disease severity (83.9%), and the patient's quality of life as evaluated by caregivers (80.1%).
Conclusions: A decision to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining therapy was implemented for half the patients who died in the French intensive care units studied. In many cases, the decision was taken without regard for one or more factors identified as relevant in U.S. guidelines.