Care provided in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is expensive and agonizing. In order to optimize parental decisions to provide or forego medical interventions, physicians and nurses are obliged to offer their best estimates of the likelihood of survival for the infants in their care. But how good are these estimates?

Methods: We surveyed M.D.s and R.N.s caring for ventilated infants in the NICU every day for 48 weeks, asking whether they thought the infants in their care would survive or die before hospital discharge. We correlated these daily estimates against each other and against the outcome of the patients.

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