Advance Care Planning in Inpatient Palliative Care Consultation

Advance care planning can confer patient and family satisfaction and improve end-of-life care. To assess advance care planning provided by inpatient palliative care teams, researchers used a national palliative care database (involving 78 U.S. hospitals) to examine 73,000 referrals for palliative care, 72% of which were made for advance care planning.

Physicians, chaplains, social workers, and nurses were each involved in roughly one third to one half of palliative care consultations. Palliative care teams followed each patient for an average of 6 days. Surrogates were identified for most patients (although the authors don't mention what proportion of patients had decision-making capacity). About one third of patients or surrogates changed c…