Advance Directives and End-of-life Decision Making in Intensive Care Medicine in Germany

Charité University Medicine Berlin

Status: Completed

Conditions: Death

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01294189

EOLD

Details and patient eligibility

About

Description of the decision making process as well as the practices of end of life care in an ICU of a German university hospital during the period when changes of German legislation occurred.

Full description

Most patients on the intensive care unit (ICU) die after an end-of-life decision (EOLD) has been made (Sprung et al. 2003). On September 1st 2009 the "advance-directives-law" was inured in Germany considering a written advance directive of an adult binding for physicians and the patient´s surrogate decision makers if it fits into the medical context (BGBL 2009). There is a lack of data describing the process and the factors associated with end-of-life-decisions in ICUs in Germany in detail.

The purpose of this observational study is to describe the decision making process as well as the practices of end of life care in an ICU of a German university hospital during a period when changes of German legislation occurred.

Enrollment: 224 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• All patients admitted to the ICU
• All patients discharged death from the ICU

Exclusion criteria

• All patients discharged alive from the ICU

Trial design

224 participants in 1 patient group

ICU-patients that died on the ICU

Description:

ICU-patients (post-operative and non operative patients) will be enrolled in the study. All patients are followed until their death on the ICU.