Abstract
Palliative care screening is important in ensuring that palliative treatment is timely and appropriate.Thinking that the Seirei Mikatahara Hospital’s Support Team Assessment Schedule (STAS),which is mainly used for evaluating physical discomfort,could be useful in palliative care screening,we surveyed the need for palliative care at Toyama University Hospital to verify the usefulness of the STAS for this purpose.Our subjects were cancer patients in the gastroenterological surgery,gastroenterology/hematology and respiratory medicine departments and the Outpatient Chemotherapy Center at Toyama University Hospital who had not undergone any surgery within the previous two weeks.In our study which was conducted in May and June 2008,patients were scored using STAS twice,with a week between the scorings.Patients for whom the score in both STAS screenings were 2 or more were considered as positive.There were 15 positive patients (18.3 %) among 82 hospitalized patients and 6 (31.6%) among 19 outpatients.Among the positive patients,46.7% (7/15)of those hospitalized and 50.0% (3/6)of those being treated as outpatients required referral for other palliative treatment.Our palliative care team has had 2.1 patients per month on average since 2007,but this study showed that there are many more patients with a potential need for palliative care.
In conclusion,we found that 21 of (20.8%) of 101 patients were positive in the screenings and 47.6% (10/21 cases) of them needed other treatments,demonstrating the usefulness of Seirei Mikatahara Hospital’s STAS as a palliative care screening system.
