BACKGROUND Nurses and physicians often describe critical care that is not expected to provide meaningful benefit to a patient as futile, and providing treatments perceived as futile is associated with moral distress. OBJECTIVE To explore concordance of physicians' and nurses' assessments of futile critical care. METHODS A focus group of clinicians developed a consensus definition of "futile...

Use of life-sustaining or invasive interventions in patients in a persistent vegetative state or who are terminally ill may only prolong the dying process. What constitutes futile intervention remains a point of controversy in the medical literature and in clinical practice. In clinical practice, controversy arises when the patient or proxy and the physician have discrepant values or goals of c...

Clinicians treating critically ill patients must consider the possibility that painful and expensive aggressive treatments might confer negligible benefit. Such treatments are often described as futile or inappropriate. We discuss the problem of deciding whether to initiate renal replacement therapy (RRT) for critically ill patients with acute kidney injury (AKI) in the context of the debate su...

BACKGROUND The medical futility rationale asserts that physicians need not offer their patients therapies that have zero or close to zero probability of success. The rationale is controversial, but it is used in practice. OBJECTIVE To examine the attitudes of patients with advanced acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) toward the medical futility rationale as it might apply to their medic...

End-of-life care decision making carries paramount importance due to the advancements in medical sciences. Since medical science has evolved over the time and now has a potentiality to reshape the circumstances during death and in turn prolong lives, various ethical issues surround end-of-life care. The purpose of this narrative review is to discuss issues such as autonomous decision making, im...

BACKGROUND This study proposes a definition of futile care and quantifies its cost in injured elders. METHODS This was a retrospective study of Medicare patients with an International Classification of Diseases-9 injury diagnosis admitted to 171 Oregon and Washington facilities from January 1, 2001, through December 31, 2002, who died within 6 months of admission. Futile care was defined as d...

Futile treatment in intensive care patients is a hot topic around the world and a matter of intense debate and controversy. The consequences of such treatments are three-fold: the prolongation of patient’s suffering without long-term benefits, missed opportunities for other patients and high cost-benefit ratio in terms of resource allocation. By the same time a lot of controversies arise. Who s...

Special characteristics of care environments have always presented nurses with some challenges. One particular situation is futile care, which is frequently accompanied by countless moral and legal challenges. The dominant atmosphere in futile care may cause moral distress to nurses and lead to a sense of guilt, pain, suffering, job dissatisfaction, and eventually cause nurses to leave the job....