Background: Even when palliative care is an integrated part of the healthcare system, the quality is still substandard for many patients and often initiated too late. There is a lack of structured guidelines for identifying and caring for patients; in particular for those with early palliative care needs. A care guide can act as a compass for best practice and support the care of patients throughout their palliative trajectory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is a lack of knowledge about how the provision and availability of specialized palliative care relates to the quality of dying in hospital and community-based settings.
Aim: We aimed to explore the quality of care during last week of life in relation to different levels of palliative care development.
Design: We investigated access to palliative care in Southern Sweden, where one region offers palliative care in accordance with European Association for Palliative Care guidelines for capacity, and the other region offers less developed palliative care.
Access to palliative care is unequally distributed across Sweden and thus does not meet the needs. The holistic perspective of palliative care is sometimes contrasted with the usual medical focus on organ failure and disease. Palliative consultation teams provide specialist palliative care competencies for staff caring for patients in primary care, nursing homes and in hospitals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSystematic improvement of quality of care at the end of life is still scarce. The regional palliative care service in Skåne, which has eight units covering a population of almost 1.3 million inhabitants, has systematically used the Swedish Register of Palliative Care (SRPC, http://www.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 1997-2003, a protocol for treatment of acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) (except promyelocytic leukaemia) was activated in four Swedish health care regions covering 50% of the national population. Based on cytogenetics and clinical findings, patients aged 18-60 yr were assigned to one of three risk groups. In this report we account for the long-term clinical outcome of enrolled patients.
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