Toward Optimal End-of-Life Care in the Pediatric Intensive Care Units (PICU)

Working in the pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) of six geographically and demographically diverse children’s hospitals, this study will examine end-of-life care through medical records and interviews with key stakeholders.

The study will accomplish the following:

• Describe the nature and range of current practices
• Assess quality of care
• Develop the first research tool capable of measuring quality of dying and death in the PICU
• Examine associations of structure and processes of care

The project will develop the following:

• A series of papers on the organizational, epidemiological, and clinical characteristics of care as well as the quality of care and the quality of dying and death
• Methodological papers that are responsive to current calls for the development of new tools and strategies for handling challenges in end-of-life care research