End of life content in geriatric textbooks what is the current situation.docVIP

BMC Palliative Care BioMedCentral Research article Open Access End of life content in geriatric textbooks: what is the current situation? Huei Yaw Wu*1, Farida A Malik2 and Irene J Higginson2 Address: 1Department of Geriatric Medicine, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, 11, Jalan Tan Tock Seng, 308433, Singapore and 2Department of Palliative Care, Policy Rehabilitation, Kings College London, Weston Education Centre, Cutcombe Road, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 9RJ, UK Email: Huei Yaw Wu* - huei_yaw_wu@.sg; Farida A Malik - farida.malik@kcl.ac.uk; Irene J Higginson - irene.higginson@kcl.ac.uk * Corresponding author Published: 31 May 2006 Received: 22 December 2005 Accepted: 31 May 2006 BMC Palliative Care 2006, 5:5 doi:10.1186/1472-684X-5-5 This article is available from: /1472-684X/5/5 ? 2006 Wu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Physicians caring for elderly people encounter death and dying more frequently than their colleagues in most other disciplines. Therefore we sought to examine the end-of-life content in popular geriatric textbooks and determine their usefulness in helping geriatricians manage patients at the end of their lives. Methods: Five popular geriatric textbooks were chosen. Chapters on Alzheimers disease, stroke, chronic heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer were examined because of their high mortality rates among the elderly patients. Text relevant to end-of-life care was highlighted. Two reviewers independently coded text into 10 pre specified domains and rated them for the presence of end-of-life information. Content was rated as absent, minimally helpful, or helpful. The proportion of helpful information was calcu