This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (11)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Accepting Responsibility

William G. Bartholome, MD, MTS

Arch Intern Med. 1988;148(11):2345-2346.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Younger¹ of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, entitled a recent review article, "Do-Not-Resuscitate [DNR] Orders: No Longer Secret, but Still a Problem." In this issue of the ARCHIVES, Jonsson et al² describe a retrospective study of DNR orders in a 432-bed university-affiliated teaching community hospital. Their findings document that DNR orders are not only "no longer secret," they have become the norm, at least for this presumably typical tertiary hospital. They report that almost 70% of patients who died in this facility had a written DNR order. The figure for patients with malignancy was even more striking, with 94% having a DNR order at the time of death. They also document that the medical record of over 90% of these patients contained "documentation of the DNR decision-making process."

See also p 2373.

However, Jonsson and coworkers' data also support Younger's observation that there are still serious problems. For . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Department of the History and Philosophy of Medicine Kansas University Medical Center 39th and Rainbow Boulevard Kansas City, KS 66103

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?