Withholding and Withdrawing Life-sustaining Therapy in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit

摘要

The decision to limit life-sustaining treatment in the surgical ICU should be based on widely held ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and distributive justice. The withholding and withdrawing of life support is frequent in surgical critically ill patients,. Empirical research into the use of do-not-resuscitate orders suggest that there is no broad agreement on which patients should not be resuscitated [1]. It is strongly recommended that research be conducted to improve end-of-life care [2]. The withholding and withdrawing of life support was frequent in surgical critically ill patients, In the study no trends were found in life-sustaining therapy in the following period. The proportion of deaths preceded by the withdrawal or by the withholding of life support ranges from 0% to 79%, in this study it was 54.4%. Intensive care management of patients with malignancy raises controversy [3].. In the group of patients who died and had a malignant tumour, the propotion of cardiopulmonal resuscitation was very low.