Background: In hospital settings, inadequate recognition of futility of aggressive medical management in patients with terminal disease and lack of the timely transition to palliative care may lead to both excessive and potentially harmful treatment and unnecessary burden on hospital resources. In order to better understand the outcomes of futile medical management and recognize the need for more appropriate end-of-life care, we evaluated the survival of particularly vulnerable cohort of patients in a community hospital who had survived at least 1 cardiorespiratory arrest (CRA) but whose medical problems led to subsequent arrests.
Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, we have reviewed the annual cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) data in a community hospital in urban settings.
Results: Analyzing the population of all patients who had CRA, 22.4% had more than 1 CRA episode and had multiple CPRs (42% of all inpatient CPR were performed on this group of patients). Overall survival at the discharge of patients who had single CRA is significantly better than survival at the discharge of patients who had more than 1 CRA episode (31% vs 4.5%). Only 18.5% of the patients who initially survived CPR after CRA were transitioned to "do not resuscitate" status subsequently, while vast majority had continued aggressive resuscitative efforts.
Conclusion: Adjusting medical care based on futility assessment in patients with chronic illness who survive CRA is often neglected, but crucially relevant step in the optimization of health care system management.
Keywords: cardiopulmonary resuscitation; cardiorespiratory (cardiac) arrest; futility; resuscitation.
© The Author(s) 2014.