More education is needed to help doctors ‘diagnose dying’ and avoid becoming caught up in providing futile treatment to patients, say researchers.
And they have found that, contrary to popular belief, a lot of futile treatment is driven by doctors themselves, not only patients and their families.
In a new paper led by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Health Law Research, and published in the British Medical Journal’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the researchers reveal the results of a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews carried out at three large tertiary public hospitals in Brisbane.
The 96 doctors who took part came from a range of specialties and departments, including emergency, intensive care, palliative care, oncology, renal medicine, internal medicine, respiratory medicine, surgery, cardiology, geriatric medicine and medical administration.
Lead author, Professor Lindy Willmott, told the limbic this was the first wide scale empirical research of its kind in Australia, and while many of the results were no surprise, it was interesting to see that doctors’ “inherent desire to go down a curative pathway is a driver for futile treatment.”
“We all know futile treatment is not good for patients, families or doctors,” she said.
“Doctors go into the medical profession because they want to save people and cure people. A lot of doctors see death as a failure.”