Journal of general internal medicine
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To assess how members of different specialties vary in their decisions about which form of life support to withdraw. The hypothesis was that each specialty would be more comfortable withdrawing its "own" form of life support relative to other forms and other specialties. ⋯ Just as some specialist physicians tend to reach for different technologies first in treating patients, they also tend to reach for different technologies first when ceasing treatment. Specialists' preferences for different ways to withdraw life support not only may reflect a special understanding of the limits of certain technologies, but also may reveal how ingrained are physicians' patterns of practice.
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To determine which aspects of outpatient attending physician performance (e.g., clinical ability, teaching ability, interpersonal conduct) were measurable and separable by resident report. ⋯ Although this evaluation instrument for measuring clinic attending performance must be considered preliminary, this study suggests that relatively few attending evaluations are required to reliably profile an individual attending's performance, that attending identity is associated with a large amount of the scale score variation, and that special issues of attending performance more relevant to the outpatient setting than the inpatient setting (availability in clinic and sensitivity to time efficiency) should be considered when evaluating clinic attending performance.