BACKGROUND Advance directives are important but often underused tools in critical care. Healthcare professionals' understanding of how culture influences attitudes toward advance directives can improve knowledge and completion of these documents. OBJECTIVE To understand the attitudes of critically ill Filipino American patients and their families toward advance directives. METHODS A descrip...

BACKGROUND Although advance directives may seem useful instruments in decision-making regarding incompetent patients, their validity in cases of dementia has been a much debated subject and little is known about their effectiveness in practice. This paper assesses the contribution of advance directives to decision-making in the care of people with dementia, with a special focus on non-treatment...

This paper explores the use of advance directives in clinical dementia research. The focus is on advance consent to participation of demented patients in non-therapeutic research involving more than minimal risks and/or burdens. First, morally relevant differences between advance directives for treatment and care, and advance directives for dementia research are discussed. Then attention is pai...

Patients prepare advance directives in an effort to maintain autonomy during periods of incapacity or at the end of life. Advance directive documents are specific to the state in which the patient lives, but an effective strategy in the family physician's office involves more than filling out a form. Physician barriers to completing an advance directive include lack of time and discomfort with ...

This paper uses a case example to review the current legal status of advance directives, as well as their ethical rationale. We draw attention to ongoing efforts to institutionalize advance directives, and to some of the tractable and intractable reasons why advance directives are ineffective. We then introduce the concept of advance care planning, and argue that we should not assume that advan...

OBJECTIVES After years of public discussion too little is still known about willingness to accept the idea of writing an advance directive among various groups of people in EU countries. We investigated knowledge about and willingness to accept such a directive in cancer patients, healthy controls, physicians, and nursing staff in Germany. METHODS Cancer patients, healthy controls, nursing st...

BACKGROUND Although advance medical directives, such as living wills and durable powers of attorney for health care, are by themselves imperfect instruments for expressing patients' treatment preferences, a possible benefit of these documents is that they will enhance patient-physician communication, especially when end-of-life treatment decisions have to be made. METHOD Structured interviews...