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“PALLCARE Seva”—A Beacon Amid the Catastrophic COVID-19 Times: A Cross-Sectional Study from a Rural Oncology Institute in Western Maharashtra


 Introduction Advanced cancer patients often require clinic or hospital follow-up for their symptom control to maintain their quality of life. But it becomes difficult for the patients to attend the same due to financial, commutation, and logistic issues.
 Objective The aim of this study was to audit the telephonic calls of the service and prospectively collected data to understand the quality of service provided to the patients at follow-up.
 Materials and Methods An ambispective observational study was conducted on the advanced stage cancer patients referred to the palliative care department at Kolhapur Cancer Center, Kolhapur, Maharashtra. We conducted an audit of the 523 telephonic calls of our service—“PALLCARE Seva” from June 2020 to February 2021. Prospectively, we assessed the quality of service based on 125 telephonic calls (n = 125) for this; we designed a questionnaire consisting of 11 items on the 5-point Likert scale for satisfaction by the patients or their caregivers at the follow-up. After a pilot study, the final format of questionnaire was used to collect the data.
 Results Of the 523 calls attended, we provided 30.11% patients with dosage change of medications for their symptom management, 16.25% patients have liaised with local general practitioners, and 14.34% of cases had to be referred for emergency management to our hospitals. We provided 23.9% of them with emotional and bereavement support and 6.21% with smartphone-based or video-assisted guidance to the patients and caregivers.
 Conclusions Liaison of general practitioners was possible in more than one-tenth of cases. The core components of our service were politeness and caring attitude, helpfulness, handling doubts regarding the illness, and an opportunity to share thoughts from the patients or caregivers. More than three-fourth of the callers have rated their experience as satisfactory and would recommend this service to other patients in need.