Outpatient palliative care effectiveness: both patients and caregivers can gain

Abstract

Evaluation of: Groh G, Vyhnalek B, Feddersen B, Fuhrer M, Borasio GD. Effectiveness of a specialized outpatient palliative care service as experienced by patients and caregivers. J. Palliat. Med. 16(8), 848–856 (2013).

Outpatient palliative care services are increasing in their effectiveness worldwide, because they can better focus on both patients’ and caregivers’ needs at all stages of the disease requiring this type of interventions. This was demonstrated before by various studies that,however, were performed mostly on patients with malignancies and thatyielded encouraging results about the severity of the symptoms and about the burden of care in the caregivers. In this analysis performed on a mixture of patients with malignant and nonmalignant diseases, Groh et al. demonstrate that the outpatient team intervention was able to reduce the severity of symptoms such as pain or digestive symptoms and were able to minimize the burden of care of the primary caregivers.

Keywords::

• caregiver
• effectiveness
• fatigue
• maligancies
• pain;outpatient
• quality of life
• palliative care

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The author has no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• • Palliative care interventions are aimed at increasing the quality of life of patients with life-threatening or terminal illnesses and can be delivered at home, at hospice and in hospital.

• • Palliative care outpatient's services have the advantage of being useful at any phase of the disease requiring specific interventions, that is, during early phase as well as during last days of life.

• • End-of-life outpatient palliative care services can increase the comfort of the patients and of their caregivers and can allow the formers to die peacefully in their preferred environment.

• • Many studies demonstrated that such services are able to improve the quality of life in patients and caregivers.

• • Palliative care outpatient's services are also able to reduce the symptom as well as the care burden in patients, respectively, in caregivers.

• • The discussed paper demonstrates in a population of patients with both malignant and nonmalignant patients that this type of intervention is able to increase the quality of life and to reduce the severity of symptoms such as pain or nausea.

• • In the same study, it was demonstrated that targeted interventions were able to reduce the emotional distress, the burden of care and to improve the quality of life in the caregivers.