Healthcare Professionals’ Understandings of the Definition and Determination of Death: A Scoping Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: During the 1950s, advances in critical care, and organ transplantation altered the relationship between organ failure and death. There has since been a shift away from traditional cardiocirculatory based to brain-based criteria of death, with resulting academic controversy, despite the practice being largely accepted worldwide. Our objective is to develop a comprehensive description of the current understandings of healthcare professionals regarding the meaning, definition, and determination of death. Methods: Online databases were used to identify papers published from 2003 to 2020. Additional sources were searched for conference proceedings and theses. Two reviewers screened papers using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Complementary searches and review of reference lists complemented the final study selection. A data extraction instrument was developed to iteratively chart the results of the review. A qualitative approach was conducted to thematically analyze the data. Results: Seven thousand four hundred twenty-eight references were identified. In total, 75 papers met the inclusion criteria. Fourteen additional papers were added from complementary searches. Most were narratives (35%), quantitative investigations (21%), and reviews (18%). Identified themes included: (1) the historical evolution of brain death (BD), (2) persistent controversies about BD and death determination, (3) wide variability in healthcare professionals' knowledge and attitudes, (4) critical need for BD determination revision. Conclusions: We concluded that although BD is widely accepted, there exists variation in healthcare providers' understanding of its conceptual basis. Death determination remains a divisive issue among scholars. This review identified a need for increased opportunities for formal training on BD among healthcare providers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it