CLEVELAND: After four decades of work – first on patients’ rights, then on family and caregiving relationships, and most recently on systemic reform—we now know that it will take additional efforts in all three areas to improve care at the end of life, concludes an assessment.
Although there has been progress in improving care near the end of life, early “optimism that the establishment of patients’ legal and ethical rights to make decisions about their own care would lead to more appropriate end-of-life treatment faded in the face of sobering data showing that declaring these rights was not enough to alter treatment patterns and that systemic issues loomed large,” write three experts on end-of-life care…