Palliative Care and Oncology in Colombia: The Potential of Integrated Care Delivery

Abstract

Palliative care is on the global health agenda, as only approximately 14% of people who require palliative care receive it [...]

Co-Designing a Strategy for Implementing the SPARC Holistic Needs Assessment Tool in the Colombian Clinical Context

“…In addition, as with the first co-design workshop, we also identified the existence of many misconceptions about PC: many specialists seem to consider referral to a PC service as a professional failure; patients and caregivers fear that they will be abandoned by their doctors and the system in general when they are in PC, which can be associated with dying and feelings of despair [11,18,19]. For this reason, we decided to also work on ways to educate professionals, patients and caregivers on what palliative care and holistic care needs are and the importance of implementing PC as early as possible.…”

“…As a first step to address this unmet need, healthcare profes-sionals must be able to identify patients' holistic needs through a systematized assessment using validated instruments. Additionally, equitable access to PC is advocated within the Colombian healthcare context [11]. The use of a tool such as SPARC-Sp can help to reduce disparity and achieve equity through standardized assessment and identification of such needs.…”

Translation and linguistic validation of the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral for Care (SPARC) to Colombian Spanish

“…Patients or their caregivers usually spend much time and energy on such paperwork (Uribe et al 2019). Other health-care system-related barriers include poor clinical information transfer and communication difficulties between health-care providers, fragmentation and instability of health networks leading to frequent changes of attending physicians, long waiting times for many treatments, insufficient supply of specialists and supplies, poor infrastructure, lack of PC services in many parts of the country (Calvache et al 2020;de Vries et al 2018;Reid et al 2021;Sánchez-Cárdenas et al 2021;Vargas et al 2016), and sometimes high out-of-pocket expenses (sometimes for treatment but also for time off work, transportation, and housing to distant cities where they receive attention) (de Vries et al 2018(de Vries et al , 2021Garcia-Subirats et al 2014).…”

“…The SPARC was chosen as the instrument to be translated, culturally adapted, and validated in this study. This decision was made after a panel of health-care professionals and patients from both the United Kingdom and multiple cities in Colombia informally concluded (in the framework of the project "Living with and beyond cancer" (Reid et al 2021)) that the SPARC construct of the measurement of holistic needs was suitable to warrant moving on to a translation (conceptual equivalence). Similarly, these experts expected that the methods of applying SPARC and measuring these needs (technical equivalence) would be congruent with the Colombian cultural beliefs, values, and experiences, based both on intimate knowledge of the Colombian context and other international experiences with SPARC (Kwon et al 2021;Leppert et al 2012;Polit and Yang 2016).…”

Cancer as a Chronic Illness in Colombia: A Normative Consensus Approach to Improving Healthcare Services for those Living with and beyond Cancer and Its Treatment

“…This improved survival has resulted in a growing number of people now living with and beyond cancer diagnosis and treatment. They need support, such as surveillance for recurrence, long-term symptom management, psychosocial care and health promotion [ 4 ], and recognizing cancer now as a long-term or chronic condition [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 8 ].…”