Providing Recommendations to Patient Surrogates About Limiting Life Support

Increasingly, patients' final days are experienced on life support in intensive care units (ICUs). Decisions about continuing or terminating aggressive interventions often fall to patient surrogates. To understand intensivists' perspectives on their role in this shared decision making, investigators surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1000 critical care physicians, evenly divided between medicine, pulmonary, anesthesia, and surgical critical care subspecialties. The adjusted response rate was 66%.

Most respondents (93%) thought that providing recommendations to patient surrogates about continuing or limiting life support was appropriate, and 67% felt very comfortable doing so. However, self-reported behavior varied widely: 21% rep…