The following is a summary of “Delivering Palliative Care to Hospitalized Oncology Patients: A Scoping Review,” published in the FEBRUARY 2023 issue of Pain Management by Han, et al.

Early, continuous integration of palliative care (PC) is advised for patients with advanced cancer, including inpatient and outpatient settings. Despite the expansion of specialty PC teams over the past ten years, the bulk of PC still provided inpatient settings utilizing a typical consult-based referral strategy. Traditional consulting, however, may cause the inpatient PC consumption to vary or take significantly longer. To better match with professional society recommendations, new care delivery models and techniques are emerging to provide PC to inpatient cancer patients who might benefit from their services. For a study, researchers sought to identify several PC delivery strategies for hospitalized cancer patients and to compile a summary of their effects on patient and health system outcomes.

The provision of PC to cancer patients receiving acute inpatient treatment was evaluated in a scoping assessment of peer-reviewed studies published from 2006 to 2021. Study characteristics, the study’s intervention and comparison arms, and results pertaining to specialized PC intervention were abstracted.

Four delivery models that had reportedly been used to deliver PC were recognized by them: Traditional referral-based consultation was one option. Other options included criteria-based or “triggered” consultation, co-rounding with the primary inpatient team, and using PC clinicians as the main team. They examined the advantages and drawbacks of each model and summarized the facts on known outcomes from each approach.

The findings gave health systems advice on deploying and using inpatient PC resources to effectively serve their specific populations.

Reference: jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(22)00913-7/fulltext