Abstract

Palliative care has evolved from providing care for patients near end-of-life into a specialized discipline focused on addressing the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of patients throughout the trajectory of an illness. For patients with metastatic cancer, timely referrals to palliative care are essential in order to have a meaningful impact on their quality of life. Recommendations for screening patients for palliative care have been offered by professional organizations; however, screening all patients with metastatic cancer poses many challenges. This quality improvement project conducted a process evaluation of an outpatient palliative care program and evaluated the feasibility of utilizing a screening tool in an effort to readily identify patients with metastatic cancer that have palliative care needs in an outpatient cancer center. Although nurses' compliance with the screening tool was less than expected, screening for palliative care needs in this setting resulted in more referrals to palliative care compared to physician referrals. Improvements in quality of life were found in patients who received a palliative care consultation and patients were very satisfied with the care provided by palliative care. The potential for financial improvements was observed as a result of this project.

Key words: palliative care, metastatic cancer, screening, process evaluation

David Liguori

Author Details

David Liguori, DNP

Sigma Membership

Non-member

Type

DNP Capstone Project

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Other

Research Approach

Pilot/Exploratory Study

Keywords:

Screening, Process Evaluation

Advisor

Cochran, Corinne

Second Advisor

Biddle-Childress, Rosemary

Third Advisor

Santana-Joseph, Sobeida

Degree

DNP

Degree Grantor

Capella University

Degree Year

2017

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Self-submission

Date of Issue

2017-11-28

Full Text of Presentation

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