Palliative care team in a Brazilian tertiary emergency department.

Objectives: To describe the process of implementing a palliative care team (PCT) in a Brazilian public tertiary university hospital and compare this intervention as an active in-hospital search (strategy I) with the Emergency Department (strategy II).

Methods: We described the development of a complex Palliative Care Team (PCT). We evaluated the following primary outcomes: hospital discharge, death (in-hospital and follow-up mortality) or transfer, and performance outcomes-Perception Index (difference in days between hospitalization and the evaluation by the PTC), follow-up index (difference in days between the PTC evaluation and the primary outcome), and the in-hospital stay.

Results: We included 1203 patients-strategy I (587; 48.8%) and strategy II (616; 51.2%). In both strategies, male and elderly patients were prevalent. Most came from internal medicine I (39.3%) and II (57.9%), p <  0.01. General clinical conditions (40%) and Oncology I (27.7%) and II (32.4%) represented the majority of the population. Over 70% of all patients had PPS 10 and ECOG 4 above 85%. There was a reduction of patients identified in ICU from I (20.9%) to II (9.2%), p <  0.01, reduction in the ward from I (60.8%) to II (42.5%), p <  0.01 and a significant increase from I (18.2%) to II (48.2%) in the emergency department, p <  0.01. Regarding in-hospital mortality, 50% of patients remained alive within 35 days of hospitalization (strategy I), while for strategy II, 50% were alive within 20 days of hospitalization (p <  0.01). As for post-discharge mortality, in strategy II, 50% of patients died 10 days after hospital discharge, while in strategy I, this number was 40 days (p <  0.01). In the Cox multivariate regression model, adjusting for possible confounding factors, strategy II increased 30% the chance of death. The perception index decreased from 10.9 days to 9.1 days, there was no change in follow-up (12 days), and the duration of in-hospital stay dropped from 24.3 to 20.7 days, p <  0.01. The primary demand was the definition of prognosis (56.7%).

Conclusion: The present work showed that early intervention by an elaborate and complex PCT in the ED was associated with a faster perception of the need for palliative care and influenced a reduction in the length of hospital stay in a very dependent and compromised old population.