Palliative Care Essay

Palliative care, and the medical sub-specialty of palliative medicine, is specialized medical care for people living with serious illness. It focuses on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of a serious illness. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family. The design and implementation of successful inpatient acute palliative care programs primarily serve all patients with complex or serious illnesses (including cancer), yet they also can reduce non-beneficial utilization of acute care hospital services when costs from such admissions typically exceed revenues, in the case of long or high-cost stays. The increase in the numbers and costs of caring for chronically ill Medicare patients has become a

Notably, most (89%) high-cost patients are not in the last year of life (Kelly & Meier, 2015). As such, there are strong incentives for hospital and health system-sponsored palliative care programs that serve specific patient populations. Improved patient outcomes such as better symptom control and clarity on goals of care manifest as avoided health crises, increased capacity to receive care safely in the home, and improved planning, with the secondary effects of reduced use of health services such as hospital admissions and emergency department visits. Palliative care is most frequently found to be less costly relative to comparator groups, and in most cases, the difference in cost is statistically significant (Smith, Brick, O’Hara 2014). In addition to providing clinical patient care, palliative care programs have also been proven to reduce costs. Spanning the calendar years 2012 through 2015, a retrospective Palliative Care Opportunity Analysis, rooted in the methodology of Cassel & Kerr (2015), was conducted to assess opportunities to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivered to Trinity Health’s Mount Carmel patients with chronic, progressive