You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 18, Issue 4
  • Goals of care are important for older adults with severe illness and their families, and are infrequently addressed by health professionals

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Nursing issues
Cross-sectional study
Goals of care are important for older adults with severe illness and their families, and are infrequently addressed by health professionals
  1. Rony Dev
  1. University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA
  1. Correspondence to : Dr Rony Dev, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Boulevard, Unit 1414, Houston, TX 77030, USA; rdev{at}mdanderson.org

https://doi.org/10.1136/eb-2015-102078

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Commentary on: You JJ, Dodek P, Lamontagne F, et al, ACCEPT Study Team and the Canadian Researchers at the End of Life Network (CARENET). What really matters in end-of-life discussions? Perspectives of patients in hospital with serious illness and their families. CMAJ 2014;186:E679–87.

    Implications for practice and research

    • Patients and families identify goals of care discussions as being essential and include preferences for care at the end-of-life, eliciting patient's values, disclosing prognosis, allowing expression of fears or concerns and questions about goals of care.

    • Healthcare providers often do not address guideline recommended elements of goals of care discussion, but when undertaken, patient satisfaction can improve.

    • Future research should examine the benefits of automatic triggers, variations of timing along the disease trajectory and interventions to improve the quality of end-of-life discussions …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None declared.