Home-based palliative care services for underserved populations.

Background: Kokua Kalihi Valley is one of the first federally qualified community health centers offering home-based palliative care (HBPC). Kokua Kalihi Valley serves low-income, immigrant populations from Asia and the Pacific Islands, whose end-of-life needs are rarely addressed. Our team includes a palliative medicine physician, nurse, case manager, psychologist, interpreter, and volunteers.

Factors associated with congruence between preferred and actual place of death.

Congruence between preferred and actual place of death may be an essential component in terminal care. Most patients prefer a home death, but many patients do not die in their preferred location. Specialized (physician, hospice, and palliative) home care visits may increase home deaths, but factors associated with congruence have not been systematically reviewed.

Methodological review: measured and reported congruence between preferred and actual place of death.

Congruence between preferred and actual place of death is an important palliative care outcome reported in the literature. We examined methods of measuring and reporting congruence to highlight variations impairing cross-study comparisons. Medline, PsychInfo, CINAHL, and Web of Science were systematically searched for clinical research studies examining patient preference and congruence as an outcome.

Assessment of pain in older Asian Americans with cancer.

This cross-sectional study focused on pain assessment in a group of older Asian Americans with cancer. Thirty-six participants and their primary nurses were interviewed, and pain intensity was measured using 3 different scales: the Numeric pain intensity 0-10 scale, the Faces expression scale, and Visual analog scale (VAS). Overall, 56% of participants reported pain.

Factors associated with place of death for elderly Japanese-American men: the Honolulu Heart Program and Honolulu-Asia Aging Study.

Place of death is an indicator of health service utilization at the end of life and differs according to cause of death. Asian Americans may have a higher percentage of hospital deaths than Caucasian Americans, yet reasons for this finding are unclear. This study examined distribution of place of death and the associations between place and cause of death in elderly Japanese-American men in a longitudinal cohort: the Honolulu Heart Program and Honolulu-Asia Aging Study.