The time frame of palliative care referrals

Background

Today we have much strong evidence that supports the early integration of palliative care into standard cancer care of all the patients with incurable cancer. At our Institution we have stablished an Acute Palliative Care Department (APCD) in 2007 and today we can provide a specialist palliative care as inpatient, outpatient and consultation service. Aim: to analyse the time frame of the referrals to palliative care services at our institution.

Methods

We collected data on the entire patient population who were supported with specialist palliative care at our instuitions between 2007–2015. We have also compared triads - periods between 2007-2009, 2010-2012 and 2013-2015.

Results

In the observed period 1842 palliative care patients (942 males, 913 females) have been served by at least one of the APCD services. At the time of the analyse 98% had already died. 99.9% of them had incurable cancer. 60% of them were treated at APCD inpatient unit, 23.5% at outpatient clinic and 15.9% were advised by specialist palliative care consultation team. The mean time of palliative care service referrals for the whole group and period was 54 days. When we compared the three triads between each other we observed a small trend to earlier referrals (2007-2009: 42days, 2010-2012: 51 days and 2013-2015: 61 days).

Conclusions

We observed earlier palliative care referrals in the last triad of the APCD existence at our institutions comparing first and second triad; still the referrals are late in the illness trajectory.

Clinical trial identification

Legal entity responsible for the study

Oncology Institute of Ljubljana

Funding

Oncology Institute of Ljubljana

Disclosure

All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.