Doctors' decisions when faced with contradictory patient advance directives and health care proxy opinion: a randomized vignette-based study

"What you Say Matters": Review of Clinical Outcome of Advanced Medical Directives Between Cancer and Non-cancer Patients in a Chinese Culture Society

INTRODUCTION

Advance medical directives (AMD) are statements made by individuals indicating the life-sustaining treatment that they would refuse in the future when they lost their mental capacity for medical decisions. While the proposal for the AMD legislation is ongoing locally in Hong Kong SAR, there are limited reviews on the clinical outcomes associated with it.

OBJECTIVE

To provide a comprehensive review on clinical outcomes of signed AMD.

METHODOLOGY

Retrospective, multi-center study, which includes AMD signed within five cluster hospitals. Records of signed AMD from 1st JAN 2020 to 31st DEC 2022 were retrieved from a central registry. Clinical information of each patient was obtained from the electronic patient record.

RESULT

456 patients with documented AMD were included in the study. 91.6% of AMD were signed by palliative care (PC) team. Majority (74.6%) of the patients were accompanied by family members or friends when AMD were signed. The concordance rate between the AMD and the medical care received was 89.5%. No patient revoked their AMD. Cancer and non-cancer patients showed similar rates of AMD concordance, frequency of Accident & Emergency Department (AED) visits or acute ward admissions, duration of hospital stays in the 30 days before death, and prevalence of receiving invasive or intensive treatments.

CONCLUSION

Our study demonstrated that PC team currently plays a pivotal role in AMD completion, and AMD remains important in ensuring patients' care preferences are executed across different medical conditions. With the upcoming AMD legislation in Hong Kong SAR, adequate promotion and education should be launched.

What are the mechanisms that support healthcare professionals to adopt assisted decision-making practice? A rapid realist review

BACKGROUND

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) establishes a right to legal capacity for all people, including those with support needs. People with disabilities have a legal right to be given the appropriate supports to make informed decisions in all aspects of their lives, including health. In Ireland, the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act (2015) ratifies the Convention and has established a legal framework for Assisted Decision Making (ADM). The main provisions of the Act are not yet implemented. Codes of Practice to guide health and social care professionals are currently being developed. Internationally, concerns are expressed that ADM implementation is poorly understood. Using realist synthesis, this study aims to identify Programme Theory (PT) that will inform ADM implementation in healthcare.

METHODS

A Rapid Realist Review using collaborative methods was chosen to appraise relevant literature and engage knowledge users from Irish health and social care. The review was led by an expert panel of relevant stakeholders that developed the research question which asks, 'what mechanisms enable healthcare professionals to adopt ADM into practice?' To ensure the PT was inclusive of local contextual influences, five reference panels were conducted with healthcare professionals, family carers and people with dementia. PT was refined and tested iteratively through knowledge synthesis informed by forty-seven primary studies, reference panel discussions and expert panel refinement and consensus.

RESULTS

The review has developed an explanatory PT on ADM implementation in healthcare practice. The review identified four implementation domains as significant. These are Personalisation of Health & ADM Service Provision, Culture & Leadership, Environmental & Social Re-structuring and Education, Training & Enablement. Each domain is presented as an explanatory PT statement using realist convention that identifies context, mechanism and outcome configurations.

CONCLUSIONS

This realist review makes a unique contribution to this field. The PT can be applied by policymakers to inform intervention development and implementation strategy. It informs the imminent policy and practice developments in Ireland and has relevance for other worldwide healthcare systems dealing with similar legislative changes in line with UNCRPD.

Variables that influence the medical decision regarding Advance Directives and their impact on end-of-life care

The objective of this study was to identify the variables that influence physicians to implement Advance Directives and assess their impact on end-of-life care. It is a narrative literature review of 25 articles published between 1997 and 2018, in the following databases: CAPES, EBSCOhost, BDTD, VHL, Google Scholar, MEDLINE^®/PubMed. The keywords utilized were: “advance directives”, “living wills”, “physicians”, “attitude”, “decision making”, “advance care planning”. The main factors that influenced physicians to implemente the directives were patients prognosis, medical paternalism, and patients understanding of their medical condition. Respect for autonomy, lack of knowledge and experience with directives, legal concerns, family influence, cultural and religious factors also contributed to medical decision. Most studies (86%) showed that having a directive led to lower rates of invasive interventions in the last days of patient´s life. Physicians were interested in respecting their patients’ autonomy and agreed that having an advance directive helped in the decision-making process; however, they stated other factors were also taken into account, mainly prognosis and reversibility conditions. Having directives contributed to reducing the use of life support therapies and adoption of comfort measures.

Advance directives and intensity of care delivered to hospitalized older adults at the end-of-life

BACKGROUND

Older adults prefer comfort over life-sustaining care. Decreased intensity of care is associated with improved quality of life at the end-of-life (EOL).

OBJECTIVES

This study explored the association between advance directives (ADs) and intensity of care in the acute care setting at the EOL for older adults.

METHODS

A retrospective, correlational study of older adult decedents (N = 496) was conducted at an academic medical center. Regression analyses explored the association between ADs and intensity of care.

RESULTS

Advance directives were not independently predictive of aggressive care but were independently associated with referrals to palliative care and hospice; however, effect sizes were small, and the timing of referrals was late.

CONCLUSION

The ineffectiveness of ADs to reduce aggressive care or promote timely referrals to palliative and hospice services, emphasizes persistent inadequacies related to EOL care. Research is needed to understand if this failure is provider-driven or a flaw in the documents themselves.

An integrative review of stakeholder views on Advance Care Directives (ACD): Barriers and facilitators to initiation, documentation, storage, and implementation

OBJECTIVE

To examine the views and experiences of patients and their health care providers on developing advance care planning (ACP) and advance care directives (ACD); and determine barriers and facilitators to ACD development, storage, and use, including implications for people with communication disability.

METHOD

An integrative review of 93 studies, analysed according to their content themes.

RESULTS

Content themes encapsulated the initiation, documentation, and implementation stages of ACP/ACD. Lack of guidance for initiating and supporting ACP/ACD impedes discussions, and both patients and healthcare providers avoid discussions owing to fear of dying and reluctance to think about end-of-life.

CONCLUSIONS

There are several barriers and facilitators to the initiation of ACP discussions, documentation and implementation of ACD, and little research exploring the views of legal professionals on the development, storage, or use of ACP documents. Further research is needed to explore the timing and responsibility of both legal and health professionals in initiating and supporting ACP discussions.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

It is important for healthcare providers to raise ACP discussions regularly so that patients have time to make informed advance care decisions. Storage of the document in an electronic health record might facilitate better access to and implementation of patients' end-of-life care decisions.

Does special education in palliative medicine make a difference in end-of-life decision-making?

Background

Characteristics of the physician influence the essential decision-making in end-of-life care. However, the effect of special education in palliative medicine on different aspects of decision-making in end-of-life care remains unknown. The aim of this study was to explore the decision-making in end-of-life care among physicians with or without special competency in palliative medicine (cPM).

Methods

A questionnaire including an advanced lung cancer patient-scenario with multiple decision options in end-of-life care situation was sent to 1327 Finnish physicians. Decisions to withdraw or withhold ten life-prolonging interventions were asked on a scale from 1 (definitely would not) to 5 (definitely would) – first, without additional information and then after the family’s request for aggressive treatment and the availability of an advance directive. Values from chronological original scenario, family’s appeal and advance directive were clustered by trajectory analysis.

Results

We received 699 (53%) responses. The mean values of the ten answers in the original scenario were 4.1 in physicians with cPM, 3.4 in general practitioners, 3.4 in surgeons, 3.5 in internists and 3.8 in oncologists (p < 0.05 for physicians with cPM vs. oncologists and p < 0.001 for physicians with cPM vs. others). Younger age and not being an oncologist or not having cPM increased aggressive treatment decisions in multivariable logistic regression analysis. The less aggressive approach of physicians with cPM differed between therapies, being most striking concerning intravenous hydration, nasogastric tube and blood transfusions. The aggressive approach increased by the family’s request (p < 0.001) and decreased by an advance directive (p < 0.001) in all physicians, regardless of special education in palliative medicine.

Conclusion

Physicians with special education in palliative medicine make less aggressive decisions in end-of-life care. The impact of specialty on decision-making varies among treatment options. Education in end-of-life care decision-making should be mandatory for young physicians and those in specialty training.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12904-018-0349-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Advance directives, proxy opinions, and treatment restrictions in patients with severe stroke

Background

Patients with severe stroke often do not have the capacity to participate in discussions on treatment restrictions because of a reduced level of consciousness, aphasia, or another cognitive disorder. We assessed the role of advance directives and proxy opinions in the decision-making process of incapacitated patients.

Methods

Sixty patients with severe functional dependence (Barthel Index ≤6) at day four after ischemic stroke or intracerebral hemorrhage were included in a prospective two-center cohort study. The decision-making process with respect to treatment restrictions was assessed by means of a semi-structured questionnaire administered to the treating physician at the day of inclusion.

Results

Forty-nine patients (82%) did not have the capacity to participate in the decision-making process. In eight patients, there was no discussion on treatment restrictions and full care was installed. In 41 patients, the decision whether to install treatment restrictions was discussed with proxies. One patient had a written advance directive. In the remaining 40 patients, proxies based their opinion on previously expressed wishes of the patient (18 patients) or advised in the best interest of the patient (22 patients). In 36 of 41 patients, treatment restrictions were installed after agreement between physician and proxy. At six months, 23 of 49 patients had survived. In only three of them the decision on treatment restrictions was based on previously expressed wishes. Remarkably, two of these survivors could not recall any of their alleged previously expressed wishes.

Conclusions

Treatment restrictions were installed in the majority of incapacitated patients after stroke. Proxy opinions frequently served as the best way to respect the patients’ autonomy, but their accuracy remains unclear.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12904-017-0234-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Factors Influencing Australian General Practitioners' Clinical Decisions Regarding Advance Care Planning: A Factorial Survey

CONTEXT

Primary care physicians are well placed to identify patients in need of advance care planning (ACP) and initiate ACP in advance of an acute situation.

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to understand Australian general practitioner (GP) clinical decision making relating to a patient's "need for ACP" and the likelihood of initiating ACP.

METHODS

An experimental vignette study pseudorandomly manipulated factors thought to influence decision making regarding ACP. Patient-level factors included gender, age, type of disease, medical severity, openness to ACP, doctor-patient relationship, and family support. An accompanying demographic survey assessed health professional-level factors, including gender, years of experience, place of training, place of practice, caseload of patients with ACP, direct personal experience in ACP, and self-reported attitudes toward ACP. Seventy GPs were recruited, and each completed six unique vignettes, providing ratings of patient need for ACP, importance of initiating ACP in the coming months, and likelihood of initiating ACP at the next consultation.

RESULTS

Older patients, with malignant or cardiovascular disease, severe clinical presentations, good doctor-patient relationship, female gender, and poor family support were more likely to receive prompt ACP. Positive GP attitudes toward ACP were associated with greater likelihood of initiating ACP promptly.

CONCLUSION

Patients with presentations suggesting higher mortality risk were identified as being in need of ACP; however, the likelihood of initiating ACP was sensitive to GP attitudes and psychosocial aspects of the doctor-patient interaction. Training materials aimed at encouraging GP involvement in ACP should target attitudes toward ACP and communication skills, rather than focusing solely on prognostic risk.

Navigating Ethical Conflicts Between Advance Directives and Surrogate Decision-Makers' Interpretations of Patient Wishes

There is little guidance on what clinicians should do when advance directives (or living wills, specifically) are challenged, particularly when surrogate decision-makers' interpretations of patients' wishes conflict with the living will. In our commentary, we make a controversial argument suggesting that overriding living wills can be ethically preferable to the alternative of strictly adhering to them. We propose four ethical considerations for determining whether it is ethically supportable to override living wills.