Referring a patient and family to high-quality palliative care at the close of life: "We met a new personality... with this level of compassion and empathy"
Title
Referring a patient and family to high-quality palliative care at the close of life: "We met a new personality... with this level of compassion and empathy"
Creator
Teno JM; Connor SR
Identifier
Publisher
Journal Of The American Medical Association
Date
2009
Subject
Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Family Relations; Hospices; Quality of Health Care; Primary Health Care; patient care team; referral and consultation; empathy; Neoplasms; Palliative Care/standards; social support
Description
Palliative care services are increasingly available to primary care physicians for both expert consultations and services to seriously ill patients. The United States now has more than 1400 hospital-based palliative care teams and more than 4700 hospice programs. We use an illustrative case of a palliative care hospitalization and intervention for a middle-aged man with severe pain from spinal metastases to discuss 4 key questions that a primary care physician faces in caring for the seriously ill patient with difficult symptom management: (1) Should I refer a patient to a hospital-based palliative care team or to hospice services for difficult symptom management? (2) If the patient is referred to a hospital-based palliative care team, what should I, as the primary care physician, expect? (3) When should I refer to hospice services a patient initially referred to a hospital-based palliative care team? and (4) How can I choose a hospice program that will provide competent, coordinated, and compassionate patient- and family-centered care? Primary care physicians now may choose among hospice programs, and the programs may vary in their quality of care. Validated tools to measure patient and family perceptions of the quality of hospice care are now available but progress in defining and measuring the quality of hospice care is still needed before actionable information will be available to guide the choice of hospice programs for physicians and consumers.
2009
Rights
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
Type
Journal Article
Citation List Month
Backlog
URL Address
Citation
Teno JM; Connor SR, “Referring a patient and family to high-quality palliative care at the close of life: "We met a new personality... with this level of compassion and empathy",” Pediatric Palliative Care Library, accessed February 10, 2025, https://pedpalascnetlibrary.omeka.net/items/show/14470.