Pattern of hospitalization of patients with cancer in an acute palliative care setting: Qatar's experience.

Palliative care is an essential part of in cancer treatment. Specialized palliative care units are starting to be incorporated into advanced healthcare systems. Qatar, a wealthy country in the Middle East, opened its first acute palliative care unit within a specialty cancer hospital in 2008. The objective of this study is to report and analyze the patterns of admissions and discharges of the patients referred to this unit over a period of three years. Our unit received 241 total admissions from July 2008 to June 2011. The age of the patients was 60.5 years, with 41.6% being local Qataris. Gastrointestinal malignancies formed the most common (34.5%). The average length of stay per admission at this unit was 30.5 days. The in-hospital mortality in our unit was 61.7%. The LOS and mortality rates were higher than those reported in the literature. We attributed that to the lack of other models of palliative care in the country and to cultural factors.