• Ye Jin Lee, Soyeon Ahn, Jun Yeun Cho, Tae Yun Park, Seo Young Yun, Junghyun Kim, Jee-Min Kim, Jinwoo Lee, Sang-Min Lee, Jong Sun Park, Young-Jae Cho, Ho Il Yoon, Jae Ho Lee, Choon-Taek Lee, and Yeon Joo Lee.
• Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
• Intensive Care Med. 2022 Mar 1; 48 (3): 281-289.

PurposeThe importance of dying with dignity in the intensive care unit (ICU) has been emphasized. The South Korean government implemented the "well-dying law" in 2018, which enables patients to refuse futile life-sustaining treatment (LST) after being determined as terminally ill. We aimed to study whether the well-dying law is associated with a significant change in the quality of death in the ICU.MethodsThe Quality of Dying and Death (QODD) questionnaires were prospectively collected from the doctors and nurses of deceased patients of four South Korean medical ICUs after the law was passed (January 2019 to May 2020). Results were compared with those of our previous study, which used the same metric before the law was passed (June 2016 to May 2017). We compared baseline characteristics of the deceased patients, enrolled staff, QODD scores, and staff opinions about withdrawing LST from before to after the law was passed.ResultsAfter the well-dying law was passed, deceased patients (N = 252) were slightly older (68.6 vs. 66.6, p = 0.03) and fewer patients were admitted to the ICU for post-resuscitation care (10.3% vs. 20%, p = 0.003). The mean total QODD score significantly increased after the law was passed (36.9 vs. 31.3, p = 0.001). The law had a positive independent association with the increased QODD score in a multiple regression analysis.ConclusionOur study is the first to show that implementing the well-dying law is associated with quality of death in the ICU, although the quality of death in South Korea remains relatively low and should be further improved.© 2021. The Author(s).

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