• Support Care Cancer · Jan 2002

    Supportive and palliative care: experience at the Institut Jules Bordet.

    • I Mancini, D Lossignol, M Obiols, R Llop, C Toth, and J J Body.
    • Clinique des Soins Supportifs et Palliatifs, Institut Jules Bordet, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. isabelle.mancini@bordet.be
    • Support Care Cancer. 2002 Jan 1; 10 (1): 3-7.

    AbstractThe Supportive and Palliative Care Unit of the Institut Jules Bordet officially started its activities in February 1999. Our Unit comprises eight beds (four rooms with one bed each and two rooms with two beds each). We admit advanced cancer patients presenting with severe symptoms whose control is going to require all the expertise of a multidisciplinary team. Whilst these eight beds are identified geographically in the hospital, the team's mobility assures continuity of care for patients who wish to stay in another department. The infrastructure of the Unit and its rooms allow close family members who wish to sleep close to the patients to do so. Otherwise, visits are allowed round the clock, though always with due consideration for patients' comfort. Patients are referred either by a physician working in our Institution (medical oncologist, surgeon, or radiotherapist) or by their family physicians. Less frequently, patients themselves specifically ask to be admitted to our Unit. The activity of the Unit itself during its first year of functioning can be summarized as follows. We admitted 155 advanced cancer patients, for a total number of 210 hospitalizations. Patients were admitted a median of 35 months after their diagnosis and a median of 20 days before death. Stays were generally short (median 11 days). We systematically used quantitative assessment tools (MMSQ, MDAS,EFAT and various VAS) to detect and monitor their symptoms and any complications. The main symptoms on admission were pain, anorexia, asthenia, dyspnea and anxiety/depression. Pain, nausea/vomiting, constipation and cough were controlled in almost all patients, whereas control of asthenia and anorexia was most often insufficient. In 51% of our cases the patients could be discharged home; 40% died in the unit; 4% were transferred to long-term palliative care units and 1% to other units within our Institution (4% were still hospitalized at the time of this analysis).

      Pubmed     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…