How individual ethical frameworks shape physician trainees' experiences providing end-of-life care: a qualitative study.

Objectives: The end of life is an ethically challenging time requiring complex decision-making. This study describes ethical frameworks among physician trainees, explores how these frameworks manifest and relates these frameworks to experiences delivering end-of-life care.

Design: We conducted semistructured in-depth exploratory qualitative interviews with physician trainees about experiences of end-of-life care and moral distress. We analysed the interviews using thematic analysis.

Setting: Academic teaching hospitals in the United States and United Kingdom.

Participants: We interviewed 30 physician trainees. We purposefully sampled across three domains we expected to be associated with individual ethics (stage of training, gender and national healthcare context) in order to elicit a diversity of ethical and experiential perspectives.

Results: Some trainees subscribed to a best interest ethical framework, characterised by offering recommendations consistent with the patient's goals and values, presenting only medically appropriate choices and supporting shared decision-making between the patient/family and medical team. Others endorsed an autonomy framework, characterised by presenting all technologically feasible choices, refraining from offering recommendations and prioritising the voice of patient/family as the decision-maker.

Conclusions: This study describes how physician trainees conceptualise their roles as being rooted in an autonomy or best interest framework. Physician trainees have limited clinical experience and decision-making autonomy and may have ethical frameworks that are dynamic and potentially highly influenced by experiences providing end-of-life care. A better understanding of how individual physicians' ethical frameworks influences the care they give provides opportunities to improve patient communication and advance the role of shared decision-making to ensure goal-aligned end-of-life care.