Physiotherapy in palliative medicine: patient and caregiver wellness.

Objectives: Despite the demonstrated efficacy of physiotherapy in palliative care programmes, there are scarce data of its real-life impact on patients' and caregivers' wellness and stress. Our aim was to assess effectiveness of a 30-day physiotherapy programme in psychological wellness and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with advanced chronic diseases or cancer and in their caregivers' stress.

Methods: Quasiexperimental before-after study applying personalised kinesitherapy, exercise with curative effects, respiratory physiotherapy, therapeutic massages and ergotherapy.

Concordance between the Clinical Definition of Polypathological Patient versus Automated Detection by Means of Combined Identification through ICD-9-CM Codes.

It is unknown whether the digital application of automated ICD-9-CM codes recorded in the medical history are useful for a first screening in the detection of polypathological patients. In this study, the objective was to identify the degree of intra- and inter-observer concordance in the identification of in-patient polypathological patients between the standard clinical identification method and a new automatic method, using the basic minimum data set of ICD-9-CM codes in the digital medical history. For this, a cross-sectional multicenter study with 1518 administratively discharged patients from Andalusian hospitals during the period of 2013-2014 has been carried out.