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Saturday, March 30, 2013

Patients should decide what the end of life is like, study says

By Mary VacVean
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published March 20, 2013

Finding out what dying patients want and treating them accordingly leads to happier patients who are in less pain and who use fewer healthcare dollars, UCLA researchers said Tuesday.

“You can improve care while reducing costs by making sure that everything you do is centered on what the patients want, what his or her specific goals are and tailor a treatment plan to ensure we provide the specific care he or she wants,” Dr. Jonathan Bergman, a Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholar at UCLA, said in a statement.

Bergman and colleagues wrote an article advocating for patient-centered care at the end of life in the journal JAMA Surgery.

People who are dying often receive care that is poorly coordinated and not in line with the patient’s values or goals, the journal authors said. That should change, they said.

The entire article is here.