Website maintenance is planned from 8:00 a.m. CDT Saturday, July 27, through 9:00 p.m. CDT Sunday, July 28. Brief disruptions may occur during this time.
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.