OBJECTIVE Nursing homes are increasingly the place where many Americans die. Thus, advance directives are critical to the preservation of the autonomous wishes at end-of-life. The purpose of this paper is to determine if preferences for artificial nutrition, as stated in the advance directives of nursing home residents, are honored in the last 2 months of life. DESIGN Secondary analysis. SE...

OBJECTIVE To describe patients' degree of knowledge about their diseases and advance directives, as well as their willingness to write these documents, among patients with chronic diseases seen in the emergency department. METHODS We performed a prospective, comparative, cross-sectional study, without intervention and with consecutive patient inclusion in two periods (2003 and 2008). Demograp...

PURPOSE Decisions concerning end-of-life care depend on information contained in advance directives that are documented in residents' charts in the nursing home. The availability of that information depends on the quality of the chart and on the location of the information in the chart. No research was found that compared directives by the manner in which they are collected and summarized in th...

An advance care directive is a person's oral or written instructions about his or her future medical care, if he or she becomes unable to communicate. It may be in written or oral form. Africans ordinarily do not encourage the contemplation of death or any discussion about their own or their loved ones' death. According to the African belief system, life does not end with death, but continues i...

Physicians and other health care workers have long struggled with decisions regarding care for patients at the end of life. An important component of this care involves assessing and understanding patient preferences for care through ongoing discussions with competent adult patients and/or their family members or surrogates. Advance care planning protects patient autonomy and helps to assure th...

BACKGROUND During the last few decades, patients' rights have been reinforced in many countries by acts of law. Measures now include health care proxies to uphold the doctor-patient relationship and advance directives for end-of-life patients. These could be relevant tools as early as the initial diagnosis of haematological malignancies because of the uncertain disease course. The aim of this r...

Psychiatric advance directives help promote patient involvement in treatment and expedite psychiatric care. However, clinicians are unsure of how to use directives, partly due to poor clarity regarding standards for capacity to create, use, and revoke them. This article recommends possible capacity standards. Capacity to create directives is a legal presumption, supported by empirical data. Sta...