• Rossana De Palma, Daniela Fortuna, Sarah E Hegarty, Daniel Z Louis, Rita Maria Melotti, and Maria Luisa Moro.
• 1 Regional Agency for Health and Social Care, Bologna, Italy.
• Palliat Med. 2018 Sep 1; 32 (8): 1344-1352.

BackgroundMultiple studies demonstrate substantial utilization of acute hospital care and, potentially excessive, intensive medical and surgical treatments at the end-of-life.AimTo evaluate the relationship between the use of home and facility-based hospice palliative care for patients dying with cancer and service utilization at the end of life.DesignRetrospective, population-level study using administrative databases. The effect of palliative care was analyzed between coarsened exact matched cohorts and evaluated through a conditional logistic regression model.Setting/ParticipantsThe study was conducted on the cohort of 34,357 patients, resident in Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy, admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of metastatic or poor-prognosis cancer during the 6 months before death between January 2013 and December 2015.ResultsPatients who received palliative care experienced significantly lower rates of all indicators of aggressive care such as hospital admission (odds ratio (OR) = 0.05, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.04-0.06), emergency department visits (OR = 0.23, 95% CI: 0.21-0.25), intensive care unit stays (OR = 0.29, 95% CI: 0.26-0.32), major operating room procedures (OR = 0.22, 95% CI: 0.21-0.24), and lower in-hospital death (OR = 0.11, 95% CI: 0.10-0.11). This cohort had significantly higher rates of opiate prescriptions (OR = 1.27, 95% CI: 1.21-1.33) ( p < 0.01 for all comparisons).ConclusionUse of palliative care at the end of life for cancer patients is associated with a reduction of the use of high-cost, intensive services. Future research is necessary to evaluate the impact of increasing use of palliative care services on other health outcomes. Administrative databases linked at the patient level are a useful data source for assessment of care at the end of life.

27 keywords...

hide…