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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Spouses' effectiveness as end-of-life health care surrogates
— accuracy, uncertainty, and errors of overtreatment or undertreatment | | Author(s) | Sara M Moorman, Deborah Carr |
| Journal title | The Gerontologist, vol 48, no 6, December 2008 |
| Pages | pp 811-819 |
| Source | http://www.geron.org |
| Keywords | Married couples ; Attitude ; Dying ; Medical care ; Terminal care ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The authors document the extent to which older people accurately report their spouses' end of life treatment preferences, in the hypothetical scenario of terminal illness with severe physical pain and terminal illness with severe cognitive impairment. They investigate the extent to which accurate reports, inaccurate reports (i.e. errors of over-treatment or under-treatment), and uncertain reports (responses of "do not know") are associated with spouses' advance care planning and surrogates' involvement in the planning. Data used were from 2750 married couples in their mid-60s and in relatively good health who participated in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) in 2004. From the multinomial regressions conducted, the authors found that surrogates were accurate in the majority of cases, made errors in 12% to 22% of cases, and were uncertain in 11% to 16% of cases. Errors of over-treatment and under-treatment were equally prevalent. For both scenarios, discussing preferences was associated with lower odds of an uncertain surrogate response. The authors suggest ways that health care practitioners could facilitate family-level conversations in order to ensure that patients' preferences are accurately represented in end-of-life care settings. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090605217 A |
| Classmark | SM: DP: CX: LK: LV: 3F: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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