大学病院における終末期がんでの死亡退院患者の在宅医療導入の現状と課題

抄録

Our philosophy is to conduct chemotherapy for patients with advanced cancers as safely as possible and to carry out palliative care in parallel. To further promote home palliative care as a medical policy in Japan, we examined how extensively this policy was introduced among terminal patients discharged from our hospital department in the past year. We reviewed the records of deceased discharged patients for one year from Nov. 2015 to Oct. 2016. The total number of hospitalizations was 353, and the number of hospitalized patients was 173. Among all hospitalized cancer patients, 33 patients left hospital mortality, of which 25 were hospitalized urgently. Overall, only 27 % received home palliative care. We were not able to confirm the place of death desired by many of these discharged terminal patients. Therefore, we recommend that terminal cancer patients and their families decide in advance where and when home palliative care should start to maintain high quality of life until the end of life.