Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jul 2009
Developing a template to plan palliative care services: the Welsh experience.
Much specialist palliative care in the U. K. is provided through the voluntary sector, with funding in part from the National Health Service and the remainder from donations. Service development has been ad hoc to date. ⋯ Where there are no beds, hospice-at-home provision provides an alternative model of care, with funding adjusted pro rata. The formula aims to ensure fairness of specialist palliative care provision, available out of hours as well as during the working day, providing patient-focused evidence-based care. This means that the specialist team must meet specialist education standards, act as a resource to generalist teams and use a core clinical data set to allow comparable audits against agreed all-Wales standards.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jul 2009
Optimal approaches to the health economics of palliative care: report of an international think tank.
More people will need palliative care in aging societies with stretched health budgets and less ability to provide informal care. The future will bring new and tougher challenges to sustain, optimize, and expand the 8000 dedicated palliative care services that currently exist in the world. ⋯ At an international meeting in London in November 2007, a group of 40 researchers, health economists, policy makers, and advocates exchanged their experiences, concerns, and recommendations in five main areas: shared definitions, strengths and weaknesses of different payment systems, international and country-specific research challenges, appropriate economic evaluation methods, and the varied perspectives to the costs of palliative care. This article reports the discussions that took place and the views of this international group of experts on the best research approaches to capture, analyze, and interpret data on both costs and outcomes for families and patients toward the end of life.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jul 2009
Research priorities in health economics and funding for palliative care: views of an international think tank.
At the conclusion of the November 2007 meeting, the assembled international expert group identified the research agenda. The adoption of this agenda would take forward health economic research in palliative care, and generate the necessary data for improved funding decision making, and resource allocation. Recommendations for study included international comparative research into the components of care and settings, evaluative studies, methodologic development and strategies to initiate studies, and make better use of data.
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A significant proportion of health care resources are consumed at end of life. As a result, decision and policy makers seek cost savings to enhance program planning. Most literature, however, combines the cost of all dying patients and, subsequently, fails to recognize the variation between trajectories of functional decline and utilization of health care services. ⋯ Significant and predictable health care services are required by noncancer patients. Trajectories of costs are significantly different for the four categories of dying Albertans. Trajectories of dying are a useful classification for analyzing health care use and costs.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jul 2009
How advocates use health economic data and projections: the Irish experience.
Approximately 30,000 people die in Ireland each year. Currently over 6000 people access specialist palliative care services annually, a figure that is projected to rise to 12,500 by 2016. In 2006, the Irish Hospice Foundation entered a joint advocacy alliance with the Irish Cancer Society and the Irish Association for Palliative Care. ⋯ New services can only be developed if there is strong evidence to illustrate that they are cost-effective in delivering patient care. Having reviewed the international evidence, the joint advocacy group has used this economic evidence to strengthen the case that the development of palliative care services can actually save money in health budgets. The campaign mounted by the joint advocacy group was greatly facilitated by the existence of good data and an agreed evidence-based policy on what constitutes a comprehensive service.