Care,Cure,and Hospital Dying Trajectories

Abstract

The study was designed to examine the relationship of cause of dying, length of hospital stay, and age to medical treatment effort orientation and amount of work effort expended. The data were obtained through retrospective analysis of patient hospital records of 184 adults who died in an urban teaching hospital. Descriptive variables included demographic characteristics, ascribed medical condition day of death, and code status. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyze the relationship of the dependent variables to the independent variables. The findings showed that the medical treatment orientation was overwhelmingly toward the cure end of the care-cure continuum, despite the fact that the majority of patients had been designated no code (non-use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and had conditions labeled by their physicians as either grim prognosis or terminal.

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