Organ Donation at the End of Life: Experiences From the 3 Wishes Project.

Purpose: The 3 Wishes Project (3WP) promotes holistic end-of-life care in the intensive care unit (ICU) to honor dying patients, support families, and encourage clinician compassion. Organ donation is a wish that is sometimes made by, or on behalf of, critically ill patients. Our objective was to describe the interface between the 3WP and organ donation as experienced by families, clinicians, and organ donation coordinators.

Narrative medicine and death in the ICU: word clouds as a visual legacy.

Objective: The Word Cloud is a frequent wish in the 3 Wishes Project developed to nurture peace and ease the grieving process for dying critically ill patients. The objective was to examine whether Word Clouds can act as a heuristic approach to encourage a narrative orientation to medicine. Narrative medicine is an approach which can strengthen relationships, compassion and resilience.

Experiences and Expressions of Spirituality at the End of Life in the Intensive Care Unit.

Rationale: The austere setting of the intensive care unit (ICU) can suppress expressions of spirituality.

Objectives: To describe how family members and clinicians experience and express spirituality during the dying process in a 21-bed medical-surgical ICU.

Methods: Reflecting the care of 70 dying patients, we conducted 208 semistructured qualitative interviews with 76 family members and 150 clinicians participating in the Three Wishes Project.

Personalizing death in the intensive care unit: the 3 Wishes Project: a mixed-methods study.

Background: Dying in the complex, efficiency-driven environment of the intensive care unit can be dehumanizing for the patient and have profound, long-lasting consequences for all persons attendant to that death.

Objective: To bring peace to the final days of a patient's life and to ease the grieving process.

Design: Mixed-methods study.