• Gaceta sanitaria · May 2011

    [Palliative and support care at home in primary care].

    • Tomás Vega, Enrique Arrieta, José E Lozano, Maite Miralles, Yolanda Anes, Cristina Gomez, Carmen Quiñones, Milagros Perucha, Mario Margolles, José Ángel Gómez de Caso, Milagros Gil, Socorro Fernández, Purificación de la Iglesia, Aurora López, Rufino Alamo, Oscar Zurriaga, Julián Mauro Ramos, and por el Grupo RECENT.
    • Consejería de Sanidad, Junta de Castilla y León, Valladolid, España. vegaloto@jcyl.es
    • Gac Sanit. 2011 May 1;25(3):205-10.

    ObjectivesTo estimate the proportion of people requiring palliative and support care at home in primary care and to describe their characteristics.MethodsA descriptive study was carried out by five Spanish sentinel networks between October 2007 and March 2008 in 282,216 people attended by 218 general practitioners and nurses. Patients receiving comprehensive, active and continued care at home were included if the aim was not to prolong life but to achieve the best quality of life for the patient, the family and the carers. A standard form was used to collect data on age, sex, type of patient, underlying diseases and other variables related to the process. Crude and age-adjusted rates were estimated.ResultsOf the 400 men and 792 women registered, 12% were strictly terminal. The mean age was 82.4 years and was higher in patients with functional disability (82.9 years) than in terminally-ill patients (78.9 years) (p<0.01). The estimated prevalence was 422.3 per 100,000 inhabitants aged 14 years or more (95% CI: 398.7-447.0) and was much higher in women than in men (553.9 versus 287.3, p<0.01). The estimate for the entire Spanish population was 309.0 per 100,000 inhabitants (95% CI: 286.0-332.0).ConclusionsThe prevalence of palliative and support care in Spain is around three cases per 1,000 inhabitants and is higher in elderly populations. More than 85% of patients needing palliative or support care have a life expectancy of over 6 months and thus represent the majority of persons using this type of medical and social support. The most susceptible groups are women and the oldest-old.Copyright © 2010 SESPAS. Published by Elsevier Espana. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…