Improving national hospice/palliative care service symptom outcomes systematically through point-of-care data collection, structured feedback and benchmarking

Abstract

PurposeEvery health care sector including hospice/palliative care needs to systematically improve services using patient-defined outcomes. Data from the national Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration aims to define whether hospice/palliative care patients’ outcomes and the consistency of these outcomes have improved in the last 3 years.MethodsData were analysed by clinical phase (stable, unstable, deteriorating, terminal). Patient-level data included the Symptom Assessment Scale and the Palliative Care Problem Severity Score. Nationally collected point-of-care data were anchored for the period July–December 2008 and subsequently compared to this baseline in six 6-month reporting cycles for all services that submitted data in every time period (n = 30) using individual longitudinal multi-level random coefficient models.ResultsData were analysed for 19,747 patients (46 % female; 85 % cancer; 27,928 episodes of care; 65,463 phases). There were significant improvements across all domains (symptom control, family care, psychological and spiritual care) except pain. Simultaneously, the interquartile ranges decreased, jointly indicating that better and more consistent patient outcomes were being achieved.ConclusionThese are the first national hospice/palliative care symptom control performance data to demonstrate improvements in clinical outcomes at a service level as a result of routine data collection and systematic feedback.

Prevalence of Sudden Death in Palliative Care: Data From the Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration

“…This was a prospective, longitudinal, consecutive cohort study using data from the Australian national Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) (11). PCOC is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and collects point-of-care data in specialized palliative care services across Australia (11).…”

“…The criteria for the start and end of each phase were recently validated and updated, and the most recent version was used in the current study (15). A new phase is assigned whenever a clinical change required patient/family reassessment or modification of the clinical care plan (11,(13)(14)(15).…”

“…PCOC is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and collects point-of-care data in specialized palliative care services across Australia (11). Data were included from all participating services that routinely collected AKPS data.…”

Implementing Outcome Measures Within an Enhanced Palliative Care Day Care Model

“…Although unvalidated to date, this complexity-scoring tool is used by the Palliative care outcomes collaboration (PCOC) in Australia and has been the subject of a number of publications to date. [16][17][18][19] Patient assessment and review: The multidisciplinary team meets weekly to assess new referrals to the SPDC service and discuss existing patients' progress towards their goals. Once a referral is triaged for appropriateness and urgency, a key worker is assigned to lead on the care plan for the patient.…”

Real Time Data Acquisition and Network Topology Research of Wireless Sensor Based on RFID

“…Velmani, R. [10] proposed an efficient cluster tree-based data acquisition scheme for large mobile wireless sensor networks. Currow, D C. [11] pointed out that under different routing modes, the routing algorithms adopted are also different. In some cases, tags can be read in less than 100 milliseconds.…”