Emergency department-initiated palliative care for advanced cancer patients: protocol for a pilot randomized controlled trial.

ABSTRACT:

Background

For patients with advanced cancer, visits to the emergency department (ED) are common. Such patients present to the ED with a specific profile of palliative care needs, including burdensome symptoms such as pain, dyspnea, or vomiting that cannot be controlled in other settings and a lack of well-defined goals of care. The goals of this study are: i) to test the feasibility of recruiting, enrolling, and randomizing patients with serious illness in the ED; and ii) to evaluate the impact of ED-initiated palliative care on health care utilization, quality of life, and survival.

Methods/design

This is a protocol for a single center parallel, two-arm randomized controlled trial in ED patients with metastatic solid tumors comparing ED-initiated palliative care referral t

SUBMITTER: Kandarian B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4090632 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature