National Quality Forum Endorses Consensus Standards For Symptom Management And End-of-life Care For Patients With Cancer

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Also Included In: Palliative Care / Hospice Care
Article Date: 17 Oct 2006 - 0:00 PDT


The National Quality Forum (NQF) today announced endorsement of national voluntary consensus standards related to the quality of care for symptom management and end-of-life care for patients with cancer.

In 2006, an estimated 1.4 million Americans will develop cancer and 565,000 will die of the disease. All patients require meticulous attention to their symptoms at all phases of the disease. For some, the primary goal is to ameliorate symptoms to enhance the patient's quality of life when the disease is no longer amenable to therapeutic interventions. Despite the multi-faceted care team required, many studies demonstrate shortcomings in the management of symptoms in the cancer patient, particularly in the end-of-life phase.

NQF seeks to drive improvement in care for patients with cancer by endorsing 1) a framework for measuring and reporting the quality of symptom management/end-of life care for cancer patients, and 2) nine performance measures for accountability, internal quality improvement only, and/or surveillance. Also endorsed are 11 areas that urgently need research.

The endorsed measures are:

-- Family Evaluation of Health Care survey -- accountability, quality improvement only (QI-only), surveillance
-- Comfortable dying -- QI-only, surveillance
-- Chemotherapy in the last 14 days of life -- surveillance -- More than one emergency room visit in the last 30 days of life -- surveillance
-- More than one hospitalization in the last 30 days of life -- surveillance
-- Intensive Care Unit admission in the last 30 days of life -- surveillance
-- Not admitted to hospice -- surveillance
-- Admitted to hospice for less than three days -- surveillance -- Death in an acute care setting -- surveillance

Detailed specifications and information on the framework and research recommendations may be found at http://www.qualityforum.org.

NQF is a voluntary consensus standard-setting organization. Any party may request reconsideration of the recommendations, in whole or part, by notifying NQF in writing no later than 6:00 p.m. EST, November 14, 2006 (601 13th Street, NW, Suite 500 North, Washington, DC, 20005; fax 202.783.3434). For an appeal to be considered, the notification letter must include information clearly demonstrating that the appellant has interests that are directly and materially affected by the NQF-endorsed(TM) recommendations and that the NQF decision has had (or will have) an adverse effect on those interests.

This project was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Cancer Institute, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mission of the National Quality Forum is to improve the quality of American healthcare by setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement, endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance, and promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs. NQF, a non-profit organization (qualityforum.org) with diverse stakeholders across the public and private health sectors, was established in 1999 and is based in Washington, DC.

National Quality Forum
http://www.qualityforum.org

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