New Research Reveals Patient Safety Concerns and Medical Errors of 50% With Critical End of Life Documents Needed in This Pandemic to Protect Patients
TRIAD SIMULATION RESEARCH RAISING THE BAR IN ETHICAL MEDICAL CARE & PATIENT SAFETY
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ERIE, Pa., Jan. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ As the nation and world are facing the COVID pandemic, a pandemic producing gut-wrenching ethical challenges, placing the physician and patient relationship at odds, new state-of-the-art TRIAD research calls into question the tools utilized to document patient wishes for current and end of life care. In this pandemic, you have heard countless times that patients need to prepare with advance directives or living wills. You have heard experts advocate to complete POLST (Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) documents on patients to ensure their wishes are followed so that we don t over-utilize precious resources such as ventilators or keep patie
Nursing facilities that use Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (
POLST) forms achieve a higher level of concordance between orders in the medical record and resident preferences than facilities that do not use the forms, a
POLST forms are available across the country. Compared to living wills and durable power of attorney documents, POLST forms have been
associated with significantly higher decreased odds of resuscitation attempts in the field and increased odds of out-of-hospital death for patients with comfort measures only directives.
The recent study, which was published by the
Journal of General Internal Medicine, is based on information collected from 40 nursing facilities in Indiana. POLST was used in 29 of the nursing facilities and was not used in 11 facilities.