End of life care in Acute Geriatric Units: making decisions about sedation.

Decisions regarding sedation as part of End-of-life Care in Acute Geriatric Hospitals, especially considering their 10% mortality rate, require an extremely rigorous approach to ensure complete ethical and clinical conformity. Developing a sedation protocol which examines a series of ethical and clinical safeguards regarding the implementation of this therapeutic measure facilitates and improves the decision-making process and encourages reflection among the professionals involved. Here we examine whether the protocol established in our hospital for terminal sedation was appropriately applied for those patients who passed away over the course of one year in our unit, and who received sedation in their final days.