Adaptive behavior, functional outcomes, and quality of life outcomes of children requiring urgent ICU admission.

Objective: To describe the adaptive behavior and functional outcomes, and health-related quality of life of children who were urgently admitted to the ICU.

Design: Prospective observational study.

Setting: Critical Care Medicine program at a University-affiliated pediatric institution.

"Futile" care: do we provide it? Why? A semistructured, Canada-wide survey of intensive care unit doctors and nurses.

Purpose: To qualitatively explore the process of the provision of futile care in Canadian intensive care units (ICUs).

Materials And Methods: A mailed, semistructured survey was sent to medical and nursing unit directors of all Canadian ICUs, asking them to estimate the frequency of provision of futile care, when care becomes "futile," the reasons such care is provided, and the resources that are available to help make end-of-life decisions. Nurse/physician agreement was assessed by chi(2) analysis or Fisher exact test.

Cultural considerations for Canadians in the diagnosis of brain death.

Purpose: This articles explores cultural perceptions and values related to brain death and organ donation from both a Western and non-Western perspective.

Source: Anthropological literature review of the historical concept of brain death in Canada using Eastern culture as a comparison.

Principal Findings: Although the concept of brain death and concomitant organ donation have become widely practiced in Western nations such as Canada, from a cross-cultural point of view these concepts and practices can be deeply troubling and may hold profoundly different meaning to people new to Canada.

Culture, brain death, and transplantation.

From the social sciences, we know the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid and open to dispute. The definition of death has cultural, legal, and political dimensions. As healthcare becomes more culturally diverse, the interface between culture and the delivery of healthcare will increase.

Cultural pluralism in health care: a South-African-Canadian comparison.

Views on the acceptance of cultural pluralism in health care are shaped by myriad of social and cultural factors. Through the comparison of Canada and South Africa, this article examines how ideology, history, demographics, and the cultural understanding of illness have shaped the views of cultural pluralism in South Africa in a way that is distinct from the Canadian perspective. Canadian health-care workers must consider such differences as we must be careful not to apply the concept of cultural pluralism in a way that people of other cultures may not understand or value.

Quality end-of-life care: A global perspective.

BACKGROUND: Quality end-of-life care has emerged as an important concept in industrialized countries. DISCUSSION: We argue quality end-of-life care should be seen as a global public health and health systems problem. It is a global problem because 85 % of the 56 million deaths worldwide that occur annually are in developing countries.