Causes of Futile Care in End of life Patients in Intensive Care Units from the Viewpoints of Nurses

Futile care is defined as the medical care with therapeutic effects that is futile and useless for the patient. Nurses play a key role in futile care or its prevention. We aimed to identify the reasons for providing the futile care at the end of life patients from the viewpoints of nurses working in intensive care units.
This study was a descriptive research including 210 nurses working in intensive care units of private, governmental, and educational hospitals in Qazvin province, 2014. All nurses were studied by census method. Data were collected using a socio-demographic questionnaire and a valid and reliable 39-item questionnaire about reasons for providing futile care in ICU. Data analysis was done using SPSS 21 software.
This study results showed that the most effective factor of providing futile care was lack of committee for deciding transfer of patients from ICU to home or general wards (4.58±0.61) and the rarest cause, was the tendency of nurses for perpetuating of patient forcibly drug (3.06±1.4).
According to the results of this study, the lack of a committee to decide on the transfer of end of life patients to the home or general wards was the most common cause of futile care in ICUs. Therefore, the formation of ethical committees with the presence of medical ethics specialists in health centers can have a significant role in reducing futile care.