From Hollywood to Washington, care at the end of life increasingly is part of the national conversation.
As more than 70 million baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964) approach the end of their life spans, the cultural, clinical and socioeconomic impacts of end-of-life care have become high-profile topics. The French film "Amour," which depicts the challenges faced by an octogenarian couple after the wife has a series of strokes, has received an Academy Award Best Picture nomination. The Institute of Medicine will convene a panel of experts on Feb. 22-24 in Washington to examine the state of end-of-life care. The goal of the IOM Committee on Transforming End of Life Care is to produce a consensus report by 2014 to address end-of-life care. "Coordinated, expert, compassionate care for people dying from chronic diseases continues to challenge the American health care system," according to the IOM’s online announcement of the meeting.
In addition, the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care is hosting a National Summit on Advanced Illness Care on Jan. 29-30 in Washington. The Coalition includes a wide range of constituencies including the IOM, the American Heart Association, the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and the American Geriatrics Society, as well as insurers, health systems, patient advocacy groups, and others.
As policy issues are discussed and begin to take shape, outcomes research focused on end-of-life care will increasingly gain importance. In the area of cancer care, here are some of the highlights of such research presented at a Quality Care Symposium sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology in December 2012 in San Diego.
Dr. Allen R. Chen
Palliative care teams: A palliative care team formed by Dr. Allen R. Chen and his associates at Johns Hopkins’s comprehensive cancer center helped change patient and family decisions regarding end-of-life care during a 4-year period and decreased use of intensive or invasive procedures in the last 6 months of life.
The team offered inpatient and clinic consultations and didactic sessions to physicians to improve how they discuss end-of-life issues with patients, plus support for family meetings to discuss and document the goals of care, said Dr. Chen, associate professor of oncology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Of the 525 oncology patients who died in the cancer center while hospitalized from 2008 through 2011, the proportion who chose to have do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders, withdrew ICU support, or chose comfort care instead of more aggressive care increased from 81% to 95% over the course of the 4 years, a statistically significant difference, he reported.
The rate of ICU care during patients’ final hospitalizations did not change significantly, but the proportion of patients who were put on mechanical ventilation for more than 14 days decreased significantly from 10% to 5%. These earlier withdrawals of care did not increase the risk of death, Dr. Chen said – the rate of survival to discharge from the oncology ICU did not change significantly.
The investigators now are looking for ways to minimize ICU visits at the end of life, he said. The presence of advanced cancer, being on a cardiac monitor, or needing supplemental oxygen foreshadowed critical illness in patients in the study. "We want to facilitate the difficult discussion" about end-of-life care choices "before critical care is needed," he said. So far, their efforts haven’t resulted in decreased use of ICU services at the end of life.
John Pesavento
Minimizing surgical risks: One of the first comprehensive analyses of surgical outcomes in patients with disseminated cancer found that the risk of death increases greatly with emergency surgery.
John Pesavento, a medical student at Creighton University, Omaha, Neb., and his associates analyzed preoperative and postoperative data from the American College of Surgeon’s National Surgical Quality Improvement Program database on move than 147,000 patients who underwent surgical procedures between 2005 and 2008.
Eight of the 10 most common procedures resulted in significantly higher 30-day mortality rates in the cancer patients as compared with the same surgeries in patients who did not have disseminated cancer.
Comparing patients with and without disseminated cancer, 30-day mortality rates were 21% and 15%, respectively, after exploration of the abdomen, 15% and 9% after removal of the small bowel, 11% and 6% after colon removal, 11% and 5% after colostomy, 10% and 5% after partial removal of the colon, 10% and 0.5% after cholecystectomy, 1.8% and 0.9% after repair of a bowel opening, and 1% and 0.1% after mastectomy, he reported. The most common operations in patients with disseminated cancer were partial removal of the colon (in 11%), partial removal of the liver (9%), partial removal of the intestine (5%), and abdominal exploration (5%), he reported in a poster presentation.