In the last decades, palliative care has been more and more focused on the evaluation of patients' and families' satisfaction with care. However, the evaluation of customer satisfaction in palliative care presents a number of issues such as the presence of both patients and their families, the frail condition of the patients and the complexity of their needs, and the lack of standard quality indicators and appropriate measurement tools. In this manuscript, we critically review existing evidence and literature on the evaluation of satisfaction in the palliative care context. Moreover, we provide - as a practical example - the preliminary results of our experience in this setting with the development of a dedicated tool for the measurement of satisfaction.

In the A. Gemelli university hospital in Rome, the presence of highly specialized inter-professional palliative care teams and spiritual assistants who are dedicated to their role in the service of inpatients is valuable to person-centered healthcare. Spiritual needs are commonly experienced by patients with sudden illness, chronic conditions, and life-limiting conditions, and, consequently, spiritual care is an intrinsic and essential component of palliative care. This paper focuses on the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick to demonstrate the importance of spiritual care as an integral part of palliative care and highlights the need for all interdisciplinary team members to address spiritual issues in order to improve the holistic assistance to the patient. Over a 3-year period (October 2018–September 2021), data about the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick administered by the hospitaller chaplaincy were collected. A total of 1541 anointings were administered, with an average of 514 anointings per year, excluding reductions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 98% of cases, the sacrament was requested by health personnel, and in 96% of cases, the same health personnel participated in the sacrament. These results demonstrate that, at the A. Gemelli polyclinic in Rome, the level of training that the care team has received in collaboration with the chaplains has generated a good generalized awareness of the importance of integrating the spiritual needs of patients and their families into their care, considering salvation as well as health, in a model of dynamic interprofessional integration.

The onco-functional balance in neuro-oncology requires maximizing tumor removal while rigorously preserving patients’ neurological status. When postoperative worsening prevents the implementation of oncologic treatments, palliative care service offers an individualized path for symptom and psychosocial distress relief. Here, we report on a series of 25 patients operated on for malignant brain tumor who did not undergo adjuvant treatments after neurosurgery; they represented 3.9% of the whole institutional surgical series. These patients were significantly older and had a lower preoperative Karnofsky performance status than the whole cohort. Importantly, in 22 out of 25 (88%) cases, a surgical complication occurred, leading to clinical worsening in 21 patients. For the end of life, the majority of patients chose a hospice care facility (72%). While a careful selection of brain tumor patients candidate to neurosurgery is required, palliative care service provided invaluable help in coping with patients’ and caregivers’ needs.