Nursingʹs perspective on improving communication about nursing home residentsʹ preferences for medical treatments at end of life

Oregon has developed a concise, 1-page medical order form, now widely used in nursing homes and hospice programs throughout the state, that conveys individual preferences for life-sustaining treatments or comfort-oriented treatments at the end of life. This article describes nursingʹs role in the multidisciplinary development, refinement, testing and implementation of the form and briefly summarizes results from descriptive research that demonstrated the effectiveness of the POLST in a nursing home sample.