It has been confirmed that some advance directives for life-sustaining treatment were partially lost due to a fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) that occurred on September 26.
According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and other sources on October 21, a portion of advance directives for life-sustaining treatment written during the six days from September 21 to 26, just before the fire at the NIRS Daejeon headquarters, has been lost. Although advance directives for life-sustaining treatment are registered immediately upon completion, data backups are performed weekly, which resulted in some data being lost in the fire.
An advance directive for life-sustaining treatment is a document in which individuals state their wishes regarding life-sustaining treatment and hospice care in anticipation of the end of life. If a medical judgment determines that a person is in the process of dying, life-sustaining treatment can be withheld or withdrawn. For the document to have legal effect, it must be stored in the Life-Sustaining Treatment Information Processing System database.
It is currently difficult to determine the exact number of lost directives. According to statistics from the National Agency for Management of Life-Sustaining Treatment, an average of 47,877 advance directives for life-sustaining treatment are written each month from February to August. Since there are no remaining records, it is not possible to identify the individuals who wrote the directives, making it challenging to provide individual notifications.
The National Agency for Management of Life-Sustaining Treatment has issued a notice advising anyone who wrote an advance directive for life-sustaining treatment during this period to contact either the institution where it was written or the agency itself to confirm registration status and, if necessary, to rewrite the directive.
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