Journal of palliative medicine
-
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes a web-based quality report card for nursing homes. The quality measures (QMs) do not assess quality of end-of-life (EOL) care, which affects a large proportion of residents. This study developed prototype EOL QMs that can be calculated from data sources available for all nursing homes nationally. ⋯ This study offers two QMs specialized to EOL care in nursing homes that can be calculated from data that are readily available and could be incorporated in the Nursing Home Compare (NHC) report card. Further work to validate the QMs is required.
-
Editorial Case Reports
Palliative care consultations as American football: full contact, or just touch?
-
Barriers to providing quality end-of-life (EOL) care in the intensive care unit (ICU) are common, but little is known about how these barriers vary by level of training or discipline. ⋯ We found that perceived barriers to EOL care differed significantly by level of training, discipline and institution, suggesting the interventions to improve EOL care may need to be locally targeted and specific to level of training and discipline.
-
The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care (NCP) has put forth eight domains of clinical practice guidelines that address the multidisciplinary nature of palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care. Extant surveys to assess education needs of palliative and EOL workers, however, have been constructed for individual professions. Thus we developed the End-of-life Professional Caregiver Survey (EPCS) as an instrument for assessing the palliative and EOL care-specific educational needs of multidisciplinary professionals.