Naved Yousuf Hasan¹*, Asiah Rugaan², Masood Iqbal³ and Sanaullah Bhatti⁴

¹American Board of Internal Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Consultant, Department of Intensive Care, King Abdullah Medical City, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
²Saudi Board of Internal Medicine and Adult Intensive Care, Director and Consultant, Department of Intensive Care, King Abdullah Medical City, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
³Diploma in Anesthesiology, Assistant Consultant, Department of Intensive Care, King Abdullah Medical City, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
⁴MRCS Surgery, Assistant Consultant, Department of Intensive Care, King Abdullah Medical City, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

*Corresponding Author: Naved Yousuf Hasan, American Board of Internal Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Consultant, Department of Intensive Care, King Abdullah Medical City, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

Received: July 19, 2021; Published: August 30, 2021

Abstract

  End of life care decision is challenging. We assessed the perspectives of physicians and nurses in a tertiary care hospital by testing 19 statements. A total of 112 physicians and 188 nurses completed the survey. Both physicians and nurses agreed to 15 statements, disagreed to 2, and regarding statements 4 and 7, nurses were having a different opinion than physicians. In particular, nurses were more likely to agree while physicians disagree. According to our results, one reason for transferring sick patients to ICU is the fear of legal implications. Physicians and nurses both agreed that patients and families were encouraged to make timely and appropriate decisions about DNR and their religious beliefs greatly influence their views regarding EOLC decisions. Furthermore, physicians do talk about health care directives with patients and family members regularly. Nurses agreed that the patients with DNR status should always be treated in the intensive care unit if indicated.

  On the other hand, physicians do not want to treat DNR patients in ICU (P = 0.003). Similarly, nurses agreed that we routinely placed a religious assessment of the patients in patient charts and nurses/physicians know about it while physicians do not agree with that (P = 0.000). It is a single-center study, hence the generalization of its results is limited. We did not calculate the actual practices of providing EOLC in our hospital. The possible confounding factors, such as age, gender, and ethnicity, have not been addressed in our survey.

Keywords: Do not Resuscitate; Dying Patients; End of Life; Perspective of Physicians and Nurses

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Citation

Citation: Naved Yousuf Hasan., et al. “Perspectives of Physicians and Nurses Regarding End-of-Life Care at King Abdullah Medical City in Makkah: A Cross-Sectional Study”.Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 5.9 (2021): 156-166.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Naved Yousuf Hasan., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.