Researchers want your input on palliative care
Researchers want your input on palliative care
Tool kit to include chart review, other instruments
To improve care of the dying, researchers at George Washington University’s Center to Improve Care of the Dying in Washington, DC, along with the American Geriatric Society, went back to a basic tenet of quality improvement: quality measurement.
Joan Teno, MD, and her colleagues are looking to define optimal outcomes. "Our aim is to provide health care institutions with a resource guide or tool kit that will allow them to examine and improve their quality of care for dying patients and their families," she says.
The tool kit currently is in the development stages. It will include six categories: quality of life, physical functioning, physical symptoms, bereavement and family burden, spirituality and transcendence, and provider continuity. A first draft has been posted on the center’s new Web site: http://www.gwu.edu/~cicd/CICD.HTM.
"Please contribute to the improvement of this document," Teno urges Medical Ethics Advisor readers. "This is an early effort to review existing instruments to examine the quality of care for dying persons and their families," she says.
Measuring what’s important
A multidisciplinary working group of 27 professionals assisted Teno in the original design. The priorities established by the group for these measurements of a quality death include the following:
• Measures must reflect patient and family views of what defines quality medical care.
• There must be broad consensus or empirical studies showing that health care institutions ought to be held accountable for the outcomes.
• Involving clinicians and mid-level managers is an important step to assure that the instruments are both clinically valid and feasible.
• Measures must be able to distinguish among health care institutions that are and are not delivering quality medical care.
• Measurement tools must be able to rate health care institutions on the quality of care and provide consumers with information that will help them decide which health care plan to select in order to obtain this type of care.
Teno says that chart reviews and patient and family interviews will be added to the Web site draft sometime this summer.
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.