Quality of the End of Life Care

End-of life care is one of the principle components of cancer care. Measurement of the quality of care provided for end-of-life cancer patients is an important issue. Recently there has been an increased emphasis on measuring and monitoring the quality of cancer care for the purpose of improving clinical practice. Despite increasing attention paid to end-of-life care in recent years, many studies have described difficulties in the final phase of life, including problems with access to hospice, inadequate symptom management, care giving burdens, care mismatched with patient preferences, and inappropriate resource use. Measuring quality of life is an important issue for monitoring clinical practice and improving outcome. Although patient assessment is the best quality measure, it is impractical to measure the quality of end-of-life care because of the difficulties of accurate prognostication for end-of-life and many patients are too ill to provide assessments. In contrast, several recent studies developed quality indicators (QIs) of palliative and end-of-life care, which assess the quality from existing sources such as administrative data or medical chart data.

Sex

All

Minimum age

18 Years

Maximum age

90 Years

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Documented confirmed cancer diagnosis.
2. 18 year or older.
3. Patients with advanced cancer (stage IV or with metastasis).
4. Any hospital admission within the last 30 days.

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Cancer patients admitted under care of other specialties other than oncology.
2. Patients who had a major surgery within one month of death, which required admission for more than 1 day under general anesthesia.
3. Patients who were following with other hospitals transferred and died within 3 days of admission.
4. Cancer diagnosis was made only on death certificate with no prior cancer diagnosis.
5. Patient died outside hospital.