Improving the integration of palliative care in a comprehensive oncology center: increasing primary care referrals to palliative care.

Confronted with the complexities inherent in delivering palliative care, effective collaboration with referring staff becomes vital. Based on the evaluation of the physical and psychosocial concerns of patients, the goal of palliative care is to craft interventions that maintain quality of life in the face of increasing symptoms and deteriorating functional status. The project's goal was to increase the appropriateness of referrals to palliative care by the primary services in the hospital. The aim was to achieve this by developing a process to assess patient functioning in critical psychosocial and functional areas, and providing this data to referring medical staff to educate them on the contribution of palliative care to symptom control and patient quality of life. The findings show that referrals to palliative care have increased over 100% from a broader range of services since initiating this project. Assessment data has been collected on 165 patients and outcomes are discussed.