Worldviews on evidence-based nursing
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Worldviews Evid Based Nurs · Feb 2013
ReviewInterventions for shared decision-making about life support in the intensive care unit: a systematic review.
Healthcare professionals and families make decisions about the use of life support for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), including decisions to withhold or withdraw life support at the end-of-life. Best practice guidelines recommend using a shared decision-making (SDM) approach to improve the quality of end-of-life decision-making but do not describe how this should be done in practice. ⋯ Few studies have evaluated interventions to improve communication between healthcare professionals and patients/families when facing the decision about whether or not to use life support in the ICU. Interventions that include essential elements of SDM need to be more thoroughly evaluated in order to determine their effectiveness and health impact and to guide clinical practice.