“Everything has been tried and his heart can’t recover…”: A Descriptive Review of “Do Everything!” in the Archive of Ontario Consent and Capacity Board

Table 1 Summary of characteristics of all cases

Description	N	%
Total included cases	41
Setting
Critical Care	33	80.5
Acute Medicine	3	7.3
Pediatric critical care	2	4.9
Unable to determine	3	7.3
Conflict over
Withdrawing life-sustaining therapy	31	75.6
Withholding life-sustaining therapy	9	22.0
Did not specify	1	2.4
Patient condition
Altered level of consciousness	25	61.0
Terminal illness	16	39.0
Diagnoses
Dementia	13	31.7
Anoxic / hypoxic brain injury	11	26.8
Stroke	10	24.4
Cardiac Arrest	8	19.5
Infection	15	36.6
Kidney failure	7	17.1
Multi-organ failure	6	14.6
GI bleed	4	9.8
Pressure ulcers	6	14.6

Table 1 provides a summary of characteristics of all cases. In total, 41 cases were included in the study. Most cases (80.5%) took place in a critical care setting where most conflicts (75.6%) were related to withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy. Patients typically had more than one diagnosis, with leading diagnoses being infection (36.6%), dementia (31.7%), and anoxic or hypoxic brain injury (26.8%)

ISSN: 1472-6939