Almost one of every five patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a major teaching hospital received treatment may be futile, according to Forbes.
The doctors who treated these patients said that older patients, especially those admitted from a nursing facility, were most likely to get care that does nothing to do with improving the quality of life, or even keep them alive for more than a brief period of time.
Those are the conclusions of a new study by a group of UCLA researchers published this week in JAMA's Journal of Internal Medicine. This study will be extremely controversial but should not be ignored. It raises important questions about the hospital care given to very sick older patients.
First, take a look at the results, which were based on a survey of 36 critical care physicians who treated 1136 patients over a three-month period in 2011-2012. Of those ICU patients, 11 percent got care that their doctors deemed futile and another 9 percent received treatment that physicians considered probably futile. These patients accounted for about 7 percent of all ICU patient days. The cost of futile treatment in one hospital's ICUs: about $2.6 million over 3 months.
While the researchers found that older patients and those admitted from long-term care facilities were more likely to get futile care, they saw no differences by race or ethnicity.
Importantly, the survey was done at the time treatment was being administered and not in retrospect. Thus, the ICU docs couldn't know for sure what the outcomes would be for these patients.
However, the researchers were able to follow the patients and what they learned seemed to confirm the judgments of the physicians. Almost no patients had what most of us would consider a good quality of life six months after their ICU stay.
