Discordant expectations about prognosis in critically ill patients

Nearly half of all adults in the United States are unable to make medical decisions for themselves about whether to accept life-prolonging interventions near the end of their life (1). Individuals who make medical decisions for critically ill patients unable to make decisions for themselves, termed surrogates, commonly have misperceptions about the prognoses of the patients they are serving as surrogates for. Such misperceptions have been reported to be attributed to poor comprehension or misunderstandings of medical information by patient surrogates and/or inadequate communication between surrogates and physicians (2,3).