Palliative care in the ambulatory setting: Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital (BSSFH).

Abstract

109 Background: Palliative care is integral to holistic cancer therapy. Early integration of palliative principles results in improvements in quality of life and survival. Despite the evident value of specialized palliative services, the conventional delivery paradigm, particularly in community centers, has remained episodic, crisis driven, and principally provided in the acute care setting. BSSFH opened its cancer center in October 2014. We chose to embed palliative services in the ambulatory setting to introduce patients early in their cancer journey to an integrated program of symptom management. Methods: The BSSFH Cancer Center is a 65,000 sq ft facility located in Greenville, SC. The analytic caseload for 2016 was approximately 1250. One palliative care practitioner per day sees patients both independently and concurrently with medical, gynecological and radiation oncology colleagues. These individuals also participate in Lean projects optimizing care in a variety of disease states. Mandatory referrals at presentation were initially codified for patients with stage 4 lung , and subsequently for pancreatic and all patients receiving multimodality therapy for head and neck carcinomas. Additional patients are referred from our weekly Interdisciplinary Care Rounds or otherwise at the discretion of their attendings. Results: The program showed ongoing growth through 2016, shortly following its inception. Total outpatient encounters in 2015 were 559 while in 2016 were 928. Total new referrals were 158 in 2015 and 190 in 2016 implying that the increase in total visits had less to do with new patient referrals and were more a result of visit-to-visit management of complex circumstances. Conclusions: Palliative medicine is optimally provided with consistency and not episodically. This is best accomplished when such care occurs in both the acute and ambulatory settings through an ongoing therapeutic relationship. BSSFH has created a model in which such care is feasible in the community setting. We are now trying to assess what impact this intervention has had on quality of life, simplifying transitions of care, and on the economics of health care within our system.