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Timing of access to outpatient palliative care services: What's in a name?

10 Background: We have previously shown the name "palliative" to be a barrier to early palliative care (PC) referral. Further, following service name change to supportive care (SC) in late 2007, we immediately observed an increased survival time of about 1.5 months from PC consultation suggesting earlier referral following the name change. This study was conducted to determine the timing of patient access to outpatient PC services over several years period after the name change.


METHODS
Records of consecutive outpatient referrals in fiscal years (FY) 2007 (pre-name change), 2008 (transition period), 2009-2013 (post-name change) were reviewed. Timing of PC access was determined by 3 time intervals: (a) survival from PC consultation; (b) advanced cancer diagnosis to PC (c) hospital registration to PC; Kruskal-Wallis, Kaplan Meir and Cox regression models were used.


RESULTS
6,624 patients had their first outpatient PC consultation during FY 2007 to 2013. Each year we observed a consistent increase in new patient referrals, as well as a longer median survival time from PC consultation (logrank <0.0001). The table below shows median survival and hazard ratio (HR) for FYs 2008-2013 as compared to FY 2007. In FY 2013 there were 63% greater number of outpatient referrals as compared to FY 2007 (p <0.0001), longer median survival (months) (7.9 vs 4.8; p <0.001), and shorter median interval (months) from advanced cancer diagnosis (5.9 vs 7.8; p< 0.002) and from hospital registration (6.6 vs 14.8; p< 0.0001) to PC consultation.


CONCLUSIONS
Following the name change of service from PC to SC, there has been consistent annual increase in new patient referrals as well as earlier access to outpatient PC services. The outpatient setting facilitates earlier patient access to SC/PC services and should be established in more centers. [Table: see text].