Surrogate Decision Making in the ICU | GeriPal - Geriatrics and Palliative Care Blog

Imagine your loved one is very sick in the ICU. So sick that the ICU doctor believes that there is only a very small chance of survival, and even if your loved one survived, he/she would have significant, permanent disability. If you were placed in this position, how would you want to make decisions about continued intensive medical treatments to support his/her life? Would you want to make it on your own? Would you want to share the responsibility for this decision with the ICU doctor? Would you just want the ICU doctor to make the decision for you with our without your opinion?

Now imagine we ask the same questions to surrogate decision makers of critically ill, incapacitated adults. How do you think they would answer? We now have some idea of how thanks to a study authored by Sara Johnson and her colleagues at UCSF and University of Pittsburgh.

The study, currently in press but accessible early online, presented two clinical vignettes to 230 surrogate decision-makers for incapacitated, mechanically ventilated patients at high risk of death. One vignette was based on a decision regarding life support similar to the one described above, and the other was about selection of specific antibiotic agents to treat an infection.
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