BMC palliative care
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BMC palliative care · May 2018
Multicenter StudyFeasibility of hospital-initiated non-facilitator assisted advance care planning documentation for patients with palliative care needs.
Advance Care Planning (ACP) and its documentation, accessible to healthcare professionals regardless of where patients are staying, can improve palliative care. ACP is usually performed by trained facilitators. However, ACP conversations would be more tailored to a patient's specific situation if held by a patient's clinical healthcare team. This study assesses the feasibility of ACP by a patient's clinical healthcare team, and analyses the documented information including current and future problems within the palliative care domains. ⋯ Hospital-initiated ACP documentation by a patient's clinical healthcare team is feasible: the number of documents received per time period increased throughout the study period, and overall, documentation rates were high. Nonetheless, symptom documentation predominantly regards physical symptoms. With the involvement of specialist palliative care nurses, psychological and spiritual problems are addressed more frequently. Whether palliative care education for non-palliative care experts will improve identification and documentation of non-physical problems remains to be investigated.