Background:

Improving the provision of palliative and end-of-life care is a priority for the NHS. Ensuring an appropriately managed ‘transition’ to a palliative approach for care when patients are likely to be entering the last year of life is central to current policy. Acute hospitals represent a significant site of palliative care delivery and specific guidance has been published regarding the management of palliative care transitions within this setting.

Aims:

(1) to explore how transitions to a palliative care approach are managed and experienced in acute hospitals and to identify best practice from the perspective of clinicians and service users; (2) to examine the extent of potentially avoidable hospital admissions amongst hospital inpatients with palliative care needs.

Design:

A mixed-methods design was adopted in two hospitals in England, serving diverse patient populations. Methods included (1) two systematic reviews; (2) focus groups and interviews with 58 health-care professionals to explore barriers to, and facilitators of, palliative care transitions in hospital; (3) a hospital inpatient survey examining palliative care needs and aspects of management including a self-/proxy-completed questionnaire, a survey of medical and nursing staff and a case note review; (4) in-depth interviews with 15 patients with palliative care needs; (5) a retrospective case note review of all inpatients present in the hospital at the time of the survey who had died within the subsequent 12 months; and (6) focus groups with 83 key decision-makers to explore the implications of the findings for service delivery and policy.

Results:

Of the 514 patients in the inpatient survey sample, just over one-third (n = 185, 36.0%) met one or more of the Gold Standards Framework (GSF) prognostic indicator criteria for palliative care needs. The most common GSF prognostic indicator was frailty, with almost one-third of patients (27%) meeting this criteria. Agreement between medical and nursing staff and the GSF with respect to identifying patients with palliative care needs was poor. In focus groups, health professionals reported difficulties in recognising that a patient had entered the last 12 months of life. In-depth interviews with patients found that many of those interviewed were unaware of their prognosis and showed little insight into what they could expect from the trajectory of their disease. The retrospective case note review found that 35 (7.2%) admissions were potentially avoidable. The potential annual cost saving across both hospitals of preventing these admissions was approximately £5.3M. However, a 2- or 3-day reduction in length of stay for these admissions would result in an annual cost saving of £21.6M or £32.4M respectively.

Conclusions:

Patients with palliative care needs represent a significant proportion of the hospital inpatient population. There is a significant gap between NHS policy regarding palliative and end-of-life care management in acute hospitals in England and current practice.

Funding:

The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

Article history

The research reported in this issue of the journal was funded by the HS&DR programme or one of its proceeding programmes as project number 08/1809/233. The contractual start date was in January 2009. The final report began editorial review in August 2012 and was accepted for publication in January 2013. The authors have been wholly responsible for all data collection, analysis and interpretation, and for writing up their work. The HS&DR editors and production house have tried to ensure the accuracy of the authors’ report and would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments on the final report document. However, they do not accept liability for damages or losses arising from material published in this report.

Declared competing interests of authors

Bill Noble has received funding from an academic journal for board membership and has received funding from charitable organisations and the Department of Health to attend conferences. Jane Seymour has received funding from an academic journal for board membership, has undertaken consultancy for international bodies, has received grants from a range of UK and international funders and has received royalties from a UK publisher.