Hola a tod@s, my dear friends.

Today we want to talk again about implementing palliative care in IC-HU, thanks to the article recently published in Intensive Care Medicine, the journal of the European society of intensive care (ESICM): “Prospective study of a proactive palliative care rounding intervention in a medical ICU” that comes from the United States.

There, 20% of deaths occur in the ICU or after recent ICU discharge.

The main objective of the research was to assess the effects of the intervention of palliative care on clinic and families, as well as processes.

To do this, they carried out a before-and-after intervencional study enrolling patients with high risk of mortality, morbidity, or unmet palliative care need. The intervention involved a palliative care clinician interacting with the ICU physicians on daily rounds for high-risk patients.


They found the following results: The adjusted likelihood of a family meeting in ICU was 63 % higher and time to family meeting was 41 % shorter; no difference in the ICU length of stay (LOS); among those who died in the hospital, ICU LOS was 19 % shorter in the intervention; adjusted hospital LOS was 26 % shorter with the intervention and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in the family decreased from 20 to 9% after the intervention.

Mortality, family depressive symptoms, family satisfaction and quality of death and dying did not significantly differ between groups.

The authors conclude that proactive palliative care involvement on ICU rounds for high-risk patients was associated with more and earlier ICU family meetings and shorter hospital LOS.

What do you think?. Could you integrate this in your ICU? 


Happy Wednesday, 
Gabi