Development and Evaluation of an Outpatient Palliative Care Clinic

Abstract

Palliative care (PC) is an interdisciplinary team approach to address patients’ physical, psychosocial, and spiritual needs to improve quality of life among those who have faced a life-threatening illness. When PC services are provided in an outpatient setting, patients can stay in their homes and have all their physical, psychosocial, and spiritual needs met by a comprehensive health care team to ensure a good quality of life. Because outpatient PC clinics offer a viable option for delivering PC in communities but are not prevalent in the US health care system and were rarely described in the literature, this article has described the development and evaluation of an outpatient PC clinic that was dedicated to integrating spiritual care. Specifically, this article describes (1) the factors prompting development of the clinic and its growth, (2) how a chaplain was integrated into the PC provision process, and (3) the processes and outcomes of evaluation of this clinic.

Characteristics of Patients Presenting at a University Outpatient Department for Complementary and Integrative Medicine

“…We also identified the presentation of the concept of an oncology mind-body medicine day care clinic in Essen, Germany, along with the presentation of two cases [23]. We found evaluations for conventional medical care in various disciplines, such as a hip fracture OPD [24], a virtual urology OPD [25], an OPD in an urban emergency accommodation [26], and an OPD for palliative care [27]. The most frequent diagnosis groups in our OPD were neoplasms and musculoskeletal diseases.…”

Is the use of palliative care services increasing? A comparison of current versus historical palliative care access using health service datasets for patients with cancer

“…Well documented challenges facing integration of early palliative care include fears of palliative care held by patients, family and health care professionals, 24,25 as well as a lack of ambulatory palliative care services which are best suited to deliver early palliative care. 26,27 Previous uncertainty about best timing of palliative care has been addressed by Hui et al who have established consensus around criteria for palliative care referral in cancer. 28 Nevertheless implementation of palliative care into high quality routine care requires not just adoption of these criteria for referral into practice, but, in many cases, targetted service development and cultural change must also occur.…”