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Review
. 2022;1(1):10.
doi: 10.1186/s44201-022-00010-9. Epub 2022 Aug 5.

Palliative care models for patients living with advanced cancer: a narrative review for the emergency department clinician

Affiliations
Review

Palliative care models for patients living with advanced cancer: a narrative review for the emergency department clinician

Corita R Grudzen et al. Emerg Cancer Care. 2022.

Abstract

Eighty-one percent of persons living with cancer have an emergency department (ED) visit within the last 6 months of life. Many cancer patients in the ED are at an advanced stage with high symptom burden and complex needs, and over half is admitted to an inpatient setting. Innovative models of care have been developed to provide high quality, ambulatory, and home-based care to persons living with serious, life-limiting illness, such as advanced cancer. New care models can be divided into a number of categories based on either prognosis (e.g., greater than or less than 6 months), or level of care (e.g., lower versus higher intensity needs, such as intravenous pain/nausea medication or frequent monitoring), and goals of care (e.g., cancer-directed treatment versus symptom-focused care only). We performed a narrative review to (1) compare models of care for seriously ill cancer patients in the ED and (2) examine factors that may hasten or impede wider dissemination of these models.

Keywords: Advanced cancer; Emeregency medicine; Models of care; Palliative care.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Palliative care for emergency department patients living with advanced cancer

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