Decision aids for life-sustaining treatment, including withholding or withdrawal and end-of-life care in emergency and intensive care settings: a scoping review protocol
Abstract
Introduction: Decisions regarding life-sustaining treatment and end-of-life care are among the most ethically complex and emotionally challenging decisions encountered in emergency departments and intensive care units. Such decisions frequently involve uncertainty regarding prognosis, limited time for deliberation and situations in which patients may lack decision-making capacity, requiring family members or surrogate decision-makers to participate in the decision-making process. Shared decision-making (SDM) has increasingly been recommended as an approach to align treatment decisions with patients' values and preferences. Decision aids are evidence-based tools designed to support informed and value-congruent healthcare decisions by presenting available options, potential benefits and harms and opportunities for values clarification. Although decision aids have been extensively studied in chronic disease management and preference-sensitive healthcare decisions, their use in life-sustaining treatment and end-of-life care in emergency and intensive care settings remains fragmented and has not yet been comprehensively mapped. This scoping review aims to identify and map the existing literature on decision aids and related interventions that support SDM for life-sustaining treatment and end-of-life care in emergency and intensive care settings.
Methods and analysis: This scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping…
Read the paper
Related studies
- The Matrisome: In Silico Definition and In Vivo Characterization by Proteomics of Normal and Tumor Extracellular Matrices
- The Escherichia coli MG1655 in silico metabolic genotype: Its definition, characteristics, and capabilities
- In silico pharmacology for drug discovery: methods for virtual ligand screening and profiling
- In silico prediction of splice-altering single nucleotide variants in the human genome
- In silico clinical trials: how computer simulation will transform the biomedical industry
- In silico optimization of a guava antimicrobial peptide enables combinatorial exploration for peptide design
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.