Intensive care under uncertainty: a qualitative study of how older patients and their relatives wish to contribute to decision-making
Gabriele Leonie Schwarz, Britt Ågot Sjøbø, Elisabeth Skaar, Ingrid Miljeteig, Reidar Kvåle, Hans Flaatten, Karen E. A. Burns, Paul K. J. Han, Margrethe Schaufel · 2026
Read Intensive care under uncertainty: a qualitative study of how older patients and their relatives wish to contribute to decision-making by Gabriele Leonie Schwarz, Britt Ågot Sjøbø, Elisabeth Skaar, Ingrid Miljeteig, Reidar Kvåle, Hans Flaatten, Karen E. A. Burns, Paul K. J. Han, Margrethe Schaufel (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13562126.txt.
Description
Gabriele Leonie Schwarz and colleagues explore how very old patients and their relatives wish to take part in intensive care decisions. Their 2026 qualitative study analyzes free-text answers from a Norwegian survey run between November 2021 and March 2023 among outpatients aged eighty and over and their next of kin. Hypothetical scenarios of life-threatening illness framed the questions.
Of the respondents, 210 people supplied 339 relevant comments. Five wishes emerged: to seek scientific knowledge, to contribute personal knowledge of the patient, to have care tailored to how differently old people age, to improve the decision process itself. A fifth wish was to strengthen feelings of security. Read through an uncertainty framework, each wish became a way of coping with the deep uncertainty of critical illness decisions. The authors urge teams to admit family knowledge into decisions and to keep relatives present when very old patients need critical care.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gabriele Leonie Schwarz, Britt Ågot Sjøbø, Elisabeth Skaar, Ingrid Miljeteig, Reidar Kvåle, Hans Flaatten, Karen E. A. Burns, Paul K. J. Han, Margrethe Schaufel |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 43544 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |