Family Members' Knowledge and Attitude Toward Life-Sustaining Treatment Decisions for Patients in the Intensive Care Unit.
Sunjung Kim, Sunghee H Tak
PMID 33840799WHAT IT FOUND
Family members of ICU patients knew little about legal rules for stopping life support but supported patient self-determination.
Nurses were seen primarily as educators. Better knowledge was linked to more positive attitudes toward withholding treatment.
Key findings
01Knowledge of life-sustaining treatment was the only significant predictor of family members' attitude toward withholding or withdrawing treatment.
02Family members perceived the most important role of ICU nurses to be explaining the disease and prognosis in detail.
03Participants had poor knowledge of the legal requirements for family consensus when advance directives were absent, with only 11.2% answering correctly.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study used convenience sampling from a single tertiary hospital in Seoul, limiting generalizability to other regions or hospital types. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality between knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions. The sample size was relatively small (89 participants).
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that increasing family knowledge automatically leads to acceptance of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. The study found a correlation between knowledge and attitude, but the direction of influence is not proven, and many families remained negative toward withholding treatment despite high knowledge scores.