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Bibliography

This bibliography and resource materials were devised by the Promoting Excellence Critical Care Workgroup to be a resource for clinicians, researchers, and administrators working to improve end-of-life care in the ICU. It includes a bibliography of books, review articles, and research articles concerning end-of-life care in the ICU setting. For those articles that are listed and abstracted on the National Library of Medicine database PubMed, links are available from the article titles to their PubMed abstract. The Web site also includes some example protocols, order forms, and clinical pathways that have been developed at a number of U.S. hospitals with the goal of improving care to patients in the ICU. These documents are downloadable in PDF format. In addition, there is a downloadable Endnote database that contains references for all books and articles referenced on this page.

Details of Search Methods
The majority of these articles were collected by performing the following PubMed searches:

    • (mechanical ventilation, critical care, or intensive care) and (end-of-life or palliative care)
    • futility and (critical care, intensive care, or end-of-life)
    • surrogate decision making
    • (culture, religion, race or ethnicity) and (intensive care or end-of-life)
After doing these broad searches, more specific searches were done on the categories that lacked numerous articles, such as staff support, ethics, legal and licensure and pain and symptoms. These categories were crosses with search terms such as end-of-life and intensive care. Some additional articles were identified from bibliographies of articles found through the searches above. Additional articles were also provided by RWJF ICU End-of-Life Work Group members.

Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care was a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families.
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