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Randomized Controlled Trial
The costs of nonbeneficial treatment in the intensive care setting.
- Todd Gilmer, Lawrence J Schneiderman, Holly Teetzel, Jeffrey Blustein, Kathleen Briggs, Felicia Cohn, Ronald Cranford, Daniel Dugan, Glen Kamatsu, and Ernlé Young.
- Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California, San Diego, USA. tgilmer@ucsd.edu
- Health Aff (Millwood). 2005 Jul 1;24(4):961-71.
AbstractEthics consultations have been shown to reduce the use of "nonbeneficial treatments," defined as life-sustaining treatments delivered to patients who ultimately did not survive to hospital discharge, when treatment conflicts occurred in the adult intensive care unit (ICU). In this paper we estimated the costs of nonbeneficial treatment using the results from a randomized trial of ethics consultations. We found that ethics consultations were associated with reductions in hospital days and treatment costs among patients who did not survive to hospital discharge. We conclude that consultations resolved conflicts that would have inappropriately prolonged nonbeneficial or unwanted treatments in the ICU instead of focusing on more appropriate comfort care.
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