title: The usefulness of intensive care treatment: perspectives of medical and nursing staff.
abstract: Which patients' states or circumstances effect the judgement of Intensive Care specialist (IC) medical and nursing staff as to how useful intensive care treatment is? Do IC medical and nursing staff differ significantly in their attitudes regarding the usefulness of IC treatment? Or do they show similarity in their attitude but differ as a group from broader community views of the usefulness of IC treatment? To gain insight into these questions a group of IC staff (35 medical, 108 nursing) and pre-clinical students (110 medical, 136 nursing) responded to a questionnaire asking them to consider how 12 patient factors including age, functional state, socioeconomic factors, length and cost of the IC stay, culpability, disease state and length of survival after IC unit discharge effected their judgement of the usefulness of IC treatment for an individual patient. Results indicated that: (i) medical and nursing students felt IC treatment more useful than IC staff regardless of the patient characteristic; (ii) IC doctor and nurse responses were very similar; (iii) IC staff considered that IC treatment "tended to be useless" or was "useless" if the patient had required "institutional care", was in a "vegetative" state before or after IC treatment, belonged to the pathology groups of "malignancy" and "diseases of ageing", belonged to the diagnostic groups "AIDS" and "quadriplegia", or where survival post discharge from IC was expected to be "< 3 months"; and (iv) cost and length of stay in IC were not factors that negatively effected any groups perception of the usefulness of IC treatment.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Boyle
authors.forename: R W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Morris
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Harris-Ingall
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003422:Critical Care / Q000592:standards*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital / Q000523:psychology*; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital / Q000523:psychology*; D016896:Treatment Outcome