Percentage of agreement with statements concerning the ethical justification of age selection
| Statement | Agreement with statement (%) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oncology (n = 30) | Nursing home (n = 29) | Cardiology (n = 21) | Physicians total (n = 80) | Policy makers (n = 29) | |
| *Significant difference with Mann-Whitney test (p⩽0.05) between oncologists and nursing home physicians | |||||
| In the care for older people improvement of quality of life should be more important than prolonging life (p = 0.04)* | 87 | 100 | 100 | 95 | 93 |
| Because elderly patients have lived the greatest part of their life, younger patients should have more rights to life prolonging treatment than older patients | 13 | 24 | 33 | 23 | 17 |
| Scarce life prolonging treatments should be allocated in such a way that as many people as possible reach the mean life expectancy. | 23 | 24 | 21 | 23 | 21 |