Admission, Triage, and Discharge Criteria for Oncological Patients in the Intensive Care Unit

This study will create one agreed set of rules to help doctors decide which people with cancer should be treated in an intensive care unit (ICU), and when they are well enough to leave it. An ICU is a hospital ward for people who are very sick and need close watching and life support. Why the researchers are doing this study Hospitals do not agree on when a person with cancer should go to the ICU. Because of this, some people who could recover are turned away. Others get treatments that cannot help them and may add to their suffering. These choices are harder than for people without cancer. Doctors must weigh the sudden illness, the type of cancer, how well the cancer is responding to treatment, how strong the person is day to day, and what matters most to the person. Cancer care has improved a lot, and many people with cancer now recover well after ICU care. Current rules do not reflect this. How the study will work No new medicine or treatment will be tested, and no patients will take part. Instead, cancer and critical care experts will vote to agree on the rules. This is called a Delphi process. A steering group of 12 to 14 experts will plan the project. They will read the published research and write draft statements about ICU care for people with cancer. The researchers will then invite 30 to 40 experts from around the world to vote on these statements. Participants will be doctors with long experience in cancer care, critical care, or emergency care. Taking part is voluntary. Participants will not know who the other voters are, so no one person can sway the group. Participants will vote in online surveys. They will rate each statement from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) and answer some multiple-choice questions. There will be at least three rounds of voting. After each round, participants will see how the group voted as a whole. The steering group will reword statements that did not reach agreement, and participants will vote again. The r