Survey Finds Doctors Don’t Like To Discuss End-Of-Life Care With Terminally Ill Patients
February 25, 2010 - Reports & Studies
When patients have a prognosis of less than a year to live, most US doctors won’t talk about end-of-life care if the patients say they are feeling well. This is according to a survey of more than 4,000 doctors in the article, "Physician factors associated with discussions about end-of-life care,"from the Journal Cancer.
The article was discussed in a January 11, 2010 report at ecanceronline.com, “While 65 percent of physicians would discuss prognosis now, fewer would discuss patients’ preferences for resuscitation (44 percent), hospice (26 percent), or where patients would like to die (21 percent). Instead, most would wait until patients felt worse or until no more treatment options were available,” the ecanceronline article, said. Another report looked at instructional videos for cancer patients. Reuters recently reported on a randomized trial in the Journal of Oncology involving videos as an education tool to help severely ill patients make decisions about palliative care. Most cancer patients, and indeed most people, do not have living wills or other documents discussing their preferences for end-of-life care. This report found that the educational videos were an effective tool at getting patients to consider advance directives and to consider forgoing intensive treatment.