Promoting Excellence : Comprehensive bibliography for critical care end-of-life issues : 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 Working Group members.

[ Go Up ]

Promoting Excellence in End of-Life Care is a National Program Office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying persons and their families. Visit PromotingExcellence.org for more resources.