Withholding or Withdrawing of Life-sustaining Therapy in Great East French Region Intensive Care Units: a 1-month Survey

Intensive care has known an important scientists progress for the last twenty years, allowing to heal more and more severe patients. Throughout the time, population has been getting old more and more, making patients affected by several diseases. As any medical specialty, intensive care has been confronted to these both evolutions. Thus ethical issues subsist for many years concerning rationality of cares intensity given to the patients. Withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy represents a non-negligible part of deaths in intensive care units in France. Throughout the years, it has been more and more leading French laws, as the Clayes-Leonetti law, one of the most important and recent one, which has governed ending life patients' rights since 2016. Thus it appears interesting to propose this study to evaluate proportion of withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining therapy and their conditions of setting up in a maximum of intensive care units in the Grand-Est region in France in 2022 ; and to collect family's feelings concerning these decisions.