Each institution can decide what the most important life sustaining treatments are in the care of its patients. I further recommend that an interview be conducted after death with a close family member to ascertain where the patient died and the degree to which this was the patients' preferred site. Were they followed. This is a comprehensive instrument which is completed by medical staff and patient. It allows the tracking of a number of domains.
Reliability is good among a trained staff.
As noted previously, survival time is one of oldest measures of medical care outcomes. Comparison of unadjusted mortality rates or survival time can be misleading because different institutions may have patients with different disease severity and socio- economic status. Listed below are instruments that one might consider to adjust for such differences. We have listed only those instruments which have been independently validated on a new sample. Chart abstraction has been shown to be reliable.