Paper: Do Life-sustaining Treatment Orders Match Patient and Surrogate Preferences? The Role of POLST
The Journal of General Internal Medicine has published a paper, "Do Life-sustaining Treatment Orders Match Patient and Surrogate Preferences? The Role of POLST."
The POLST form is a portable medical order communicating patient treatment wishes. It is essential to high-quality medical care that life-sustaining treatment orders match the current, values-based preferences of patients or their surrogate decision-makers. It is unknown whether concordance between orders and current preferences is higher when a POLST form is used compared to standard documentation practices.
In this paper, researchers examine forty Indiana nursing facilities (29 where POLST is used and 11 where POLST is not in use) to assess concordance between existing orders and current preferences for nursing facility residents.
To read the paper, click here.
To go to the National POLST, click here.
