• Revista clínica española · Aug 2014

    Characteristics and use of advance directives in a tertiary hospital. Period 2001-2011.

    • A Antolín, S Jiménez, M González, E Gómez, M Sánchez, and O Miró.
    • Área Urgencias, Hospital Clínic, Grupo Investigación «Urgencias: procesos y patologías», Fundació Clínic, Barcelona, España. Electronic address: antolin@clinic.ub.es.
    • Rev Clin Esp. 2014 Aug 1;214(6):296-302.

    ObjectiveTo evaluate the characeristics of patients who provide written advance directives and their use in healthcare practice.MethodologyObservational, descriptive, retrospective study of all written advance directives registered at a university hospital between 2001-2011. The clinical-demographic characteristics of the patients at the time they provided the documents was studied, as was as the later use of the documents through an electronic medical history analysis.ResultsA total of 130 advance directive documents were registered. At the time of their provision, the average patient age was 61 years; some 64% were diagnosed with a neoplastic illness; 73% were completely independent (Barthel), and 36.4% presented no comorbidities (Charlson). The women were slightly older than the men (63 vs. 60, P=0.17), and they were more likely to provide advance directives (61.5% vs. 31.5%, P=0.01) than men; the womens' illnesses were less relevant (P=0.001), and the women presented less comorbidity (P=0.01). A total of 361 medical acts were reviewed (193 hospital admissions and 168 emergency visits). At the end of the study, 74 patients were alive (57%), 37 had died (28%), and in 19 cases (15%), their evolution was lost. Of those who died, 13 (35.1%) were functionally incapacitated in the terminal phase of their illness, and in 9 (69%), the advance directives were applied in the final phase of their illness.ConclusionsThe number of registered advance directives is low; they do not interfere in the care process, and the documents are considered in the final decisions of life.Copyright © 2013 Elsevier España, S.L. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.