Evaluation of Palliative Care Related Hospital Admissions in a Regional Centre.

Objectives: A significant proportion of adults admitted to hospital are in their last year of life. We evaluated admissions for these patients.

Methods: We identified ambulance callouts to patients known to the palliative care team.

Seeking Excellence in End of Life Care UK (SEECare UK): a UK multi-centred service evaluation.

Objective: To evaluate the care of patients dying in hospital without support from specialists in palliative care (SPC), better understand their needs and factors influencing their care.

Methods: Prospective UK-wide service evaluation including all dying adult inpatients unknown to SPC, excluding those in emergency departments/intensive care units. Holistic needs were assessed through a standardised proforma.

Hospital deaths dashboard: care indicators.

Objectives: We wanted to create a medical/nursing led data collection tool to allow for an ongoing audit of the quality of deaths in a teaching hospital. We wanted to be able to produce a visual summary to monitor our involvement, use of PRN medication, recognition of death, treatment escalation plans and communication aspects. We feel these are good surrogate indicators for quality end-of-life care.

Retrieval of aerosol refractive index from extinction spectra with a damped harmonic-oscillator band model.

A new method for the retrieval of the spectral refractive indices of micrometer-sized particles from infrared aerosol extinction spectra has been developed. With this method we use a classical damped harmonic-oscillator model of molecular absorption in conjunction with Mie scattering to model extinction spectra, which we then fit to the measurements using a numerical optimal estimation algorithm. The main advantage of this method over the more traditional Kramers-Kronig approach is that it allows the full complex refractive-index spectra, along with the parameters of the particle size distribution, to be retrieved from a single extinction spectrum.