• BMC palliative care · May 2018

    Benchmarking time to initiation of end-of-life homecare nursing: a population-based cancer cohort study in regions across Canada.

    • Hsien Seow, Danial Qureshi, Lisa Barbera, Kim McGrail, Beverley Lawson, Fred Burge, and Rinku Sutradhar.
    • Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
    • BMC Palliat Care. 2018 May 4; 17 (1): 70.

    BackgroundSeveral studies have demonstrated the benefits of early initiation of end-of-life care, particularly homecare nursing services. However, there is little research on variations in the timing of when end-of-life homecare nursing is initiated and no established benchmarks.MethodsThis is a retrospective cohort study of patients with a cancer-confirmed cause of death between 2004 and 2009, from three Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Ontario). We linked multiple administrative health databases within each province to examine homecare use in the last 6 months of life. Our primary outcome was mean time (in days) to first end-of-life homecare nursing visit, starting from 6 months before death, by region. We developed an empiric benchmark for this outcome using a funnel plot, controlling for region size.ResultsOf the 28 regions, large variations in the outcome were observed, with the longest mean time (97 days) being two-fold longer than the shortest (55 days). On average, British Columbia and Nova Scotia had the first and second shortest mean times, respectively. The province of Ontario consistently had longer mean times. The empiric benchmark mean based on best-performing regions was 57 mean days.ConclusionsSignificant variation exists for the time to initiation of end-of-life homecare nursing across regions. Understanding regional variation and developing an empiric benchmark for homecare nursing can support health system planners to set achievable targets for earlier initiation of end-of-life care.

      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…