Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR
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J Intellect Disabil Res · Mar 2016
Physicians' recognition of death in the foreseeable future in patients with intellectual disabilities.
Physicians are increasingly confronted with people with intellectual disabilities (ID) who are facing life-threatening diseases. We aimed to explore when and based on which information sources and signals physicians recognised that a patient with ID would die in the foreseeable future. Insights may help in identifying patients in need of palliative care. ⋯ Results indicate that the physicians' ability to foresee death is a result of a process of growing awareness in which multiple signals from different information sources converge. This demands continuous multi-disciplinary communication because people involved have their own unique interactions with the patient and can therefore contribute to a growing and timely awareness of patients' death in the future.