Abstract
Improving end-of-life care requires accurate indicators of the quality of dying. The purpose of this study was to measure the agreement among family members who rate a loved one's dying experience. We administered the Quality of Dying and Death instrument to 94 family members of 38 patients who died in the intensive care unit. We measured a quality of dying score of 60 out of 100 points and found moderate agreement among family members as measured by an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.44. Variability on individual items ranged from an ICC of 0.15 to 1.0. Families demonstrated more agreement on frequencies of events (ICC 0.54) than on determinations of quality (ICC 0.32). These findings reveal important variability among family raters and suggest that until the variability is understood, multiple raters may generate more comprehensive end-of-life data and may more accurately reflect the quality of dying and death.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 306-315 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Journal of Pain and Symptom Management |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2004 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Death
- attitude to death
- end-of-life care
- family
- outcome assessment
- proxy
- quality indicators health care
- quality of dying
- quality of health care
- terminal care
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Nursing(all)
- Clinical Neurology
- Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine