Hospitals Increasingly Use Palliative Care To Improve Patients' Quality Of Life, Reduce Costs

Main Category: Palliative Care / Hospice Care
Article Date: 06 Jul 2007 - 11:00 PDT

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The Washington Post on Tuesday examined the growing practice of palliative care, which "adapts aspects of the hospice philosophy without requiring patients to forgo curative care or to have a life expectancy of six months or less." According to the Post, about one-third of U.S. hospitals now offer some form of palliative care, and last year the American Board of Medical Specialties recognized palliative medicine as a specialized field.

The "main goal" of palliative care is to "improve a patient's quality of life," the Post reports. Interdisciplinary palliative care teams at hospitals "often devote much of their time to working with the dying," but as such programs "expand and mature, the teams often begin to see patients earlier in the course of disease, creating a continuum of care from diagnosis on," the Post reports. Palliative care also can keep hospital costs down "by moving patients out of intensive care -- and even out of the hospital -- sooner and by managing pain, nausea or respiratory problems better."

Sean Morrison, director of the National Palliative Care Research Center at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said, "We save a lot of money by providing the right care to the right patients at the right time." Diane Meier, head of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, also based at Mount Sinai, said the rapid growth in palliative care shows hospital administrators are seeing cost savings resulting from the care. Meier said, "Hospital CEOs are voting with their feet. We are way past the tipping point" (Kenen, Washington Post, 7/3).

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