Development of Palliative Medicine Consensus Guidelines for Consults in the Emergency Department (787)

Abstract

1.Participants will understand the current barriers to palliative care consults generated from the emergency department.2.Participants will review the results of the expert consensus panel on guidelines for palliative care consultations in the emergency department.3.Participants will compare and contrast these results with those of CAPC, the American College of Critical Care Medicine and C.T. Bradley’s group of expert palliative surgeons (Guidelines for the SICU). Within the Emergency Department system, geared to diagnosis and rapid stabilization, there are an increasing number of patients who present for intensive symptom management and chronic illness. There is a need to develop and implement a non-burdensome process to identify Emergency patients needing palliative care so patients, family and involved ED staff will all benefit from Palliative Medicine intervention. Research Objectives1.Identify a set of expert consensus guidelines for identification of ED patients that are likely to benefit from specialist palliative care.2.Publish the consensus guidelines in emergency medicine literature to educate ED staff about when to consult PC. Using an email-based Delphi technique, a group of local and national experts in both Emergency Medicine and Palliative Medicine were queried in a series of 3 rounds to agree on a group of scenarios most appropriate for ED generated Palliative Care consults. The initial rounds and final consensus guidelines will be discussed. The relationship between these results and those formulated by CAPC, the American College of Critical Care Medicine and C.T. Bradley’s group of expert palliative surgeons will be reviewed for similarities and differences. Based on data from an email-based Delphi consensus panel, a set of guidelines for appropriate ED driven PC consults were agreed upon.