• Reine De Bock, Nele Van Den Noortgate, and Ruth Piers.
• 1 Faculty of Medicine and Health Science, Ghent University , Ghent, Belgium .
• J Palliat Med. 2018 Feb 1; 21 (2): 220-224.

BackgroundTimely identification of patients in need of palliative care is especially challenging in a geriatric population because of prognostic uncertainty. The Supportive and Palliative Care Indicators Tool (SPICT™) aims at facilitating this identification, yet has not been validated in a geriatric population.ObjectiveThis study validates the SPICT in a geriatric patient population admitted to the hospital.DesignThis is a retrospective cohort study.SettingSubject were patients admitted to the acute geriatric ward of a Belgian university hospital between January 1 and June 30, 2014.MeasurementsData including demographics, functional status, comorbidities, treatment limitation decision (TLD), and one-year mortality were collected. SPICT was measured retrospectively by an independent assessor.ResultsOut of 435 included patients, 54.7% had a positive SPICT, using a cut-off value of 2 for the general indicators and a cut-off value of 1 for the clinical questions. SPICT-positive patients were older (p = 0.033), more frequently male (p = 0.028), and had more comorbidities (p = 0.015) than SPICT-negative patients. The overall one-year mortality was 32.2%, 48.7% in SPICT-positive patients, and 11.5% in SPICT-negative patients (p < 0.001). SPICT predicted one-year mortality with a sensitivity of 0.841 and a specificity of 0.579. The area under the curve of the general indicators (0.758) and the clinical indicators of SPICT (0.748) did not differ (p = 0.638). In 71.4% of SPICT-positive cases, a TLD was present versus 26.9% in SPICT-negative cases (p < 0.001).ConclusionSPICT seems to be valuable for identifying geriatric patients in need of palliative care as it demonstrates significant association with one-year mortality and with clinical survival predictions of experienced geriatricians, as reflected by TLDs given.

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