To What Extent Do Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Reflect Patients' Preferences for Care at the End of Life?

Objective: To assess whether medical orders within Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) forms reflect patients' preferences for care at the end of life.

Design: This cross-sectional study assessed the agreement between medical orders in POLST forms and the free-form text documentation of an advance care planning conversation performed by an independent researcher during a single episode of hospitalization.

Setting And Participants: Inpatients at a single public university hospital, aged 21 years or older, and for whom one of their attending physicians provided a negative answer to the following question: "Would I be surprised if this patient died in the next year?" Data collection occurred between October 2016 and September 2017.

Acute bullous hemorrhagic prurigo: a diagnostic challenge.

Insect bites and bite wounds are quite common and most often have mild repercussions in humans. Statistics on the incidence of accidents caused by insects are not available, and the skin reactions after the bites are not always known. The authors present two cases of patients with hemorrhagic blisters on their hands after tabanidae bites and discuss the factors that cause the problem and the importance of the differential diagnosis of blisters with hemorrhagic content on human skin.

Evaluation of the Interrater Reliability of End-of-Life Medical Orders in the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment Form.

Importance: Despite its spread in much of the United States and increased international interest, the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) paradigm still lacks supporting evidence. The interrater reliability of the POLST form to translate patients' values and preferences into medical orders for care at the end of life remains to be studied.

Objective: To assess the interrater reliability of the medical orders documented in POLST forms.