Palliative Care Telephone Consultation: Who Calls and What do they Need to Know?

Abstract

British Columbia's Palliative Care Hotline provides a valuable service that has been utilized province-wide with increasing frequency over the 6 years it has been in operation. It serves a variety of professionals and significant number of patients. Rural communities utilize the service with the most frequency, indicating the support needed in these communities. Similar services should be considered in other jurisdictions.

‘Like doing a jigsaw with half the parts missing’: community pharmacists and the management of cancer pain in the community

“…While pharmacists may worry that they give repetitious or conflicting information, there is an important role for checking and reinforcing understanding. Medicines and pain management have been shown to be the most common reason for calls to palliative care helplines out of hours . The accounts of a small number of pharmacists showed they had learned through experience that patients' priorities and concerns about opioids were not those traditionally discussed in textbooks.…”

“…Medicines and pain management have been shown to be the most common reason for calls to palliative care helplines out of hours. [18,19] The accounts of a small number of pharmacists showed they had learned through experience that patients' priorities and concerns about opioids were not those traditionally discussed in textbooks. This may reflect the level of rapport built by individual pharmacists.…”

To Intubate or Not to Intubate: Emergency Medicine Physicians' Perspective on Intubating Critically Ill, Terminal Cancer Patients

“…26,27 Given the shortage, creating and supporting a system, adapting an existing model such as British Columbia's Palliative Care Hotlines that supports 24/7 hours phone consultation may be a reasonable step to follow the national recommendations and to increase prompt accessibility to palliative care consultation, even for emergent situations during nights and weekend hours. 28 The health system needs to ensure the availability of palliative care consultation in the ED to help support EPs to do what they believe is ''the right thing'' for dying cancer patients.…”

Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 24

“…This measure has been widely utilized with a range of populations including older adults with chronic health related conditions (Allen, Hilgeman, Ege, Shuster, & Burgio, 2008). Nearly all domains on the BMMRS have demonstrated adequate convergent and discriminant validity and good-to-excellent reliability in previous studies (Bush et al, 2012;Idler et al, 2003).…”