A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department

The hospitalisation and management of patients at the end-of-life by emergency medical services is presenting a challenge to our society as the majority of people approaching death explicitly state that they want to die at home and the transition from acute care to palliation is difficult. In additi...

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Main Authors:	Forero, Roberto, McDonnell, Geoff, Gallego, Blanca, McCarthy, Sally, Mohsin, Mohammed, Shanley, Chris, Formby, Frank, Hillman, Ken
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2012
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3303563/

id	pubmed-3303563
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-33035632012-04-12 A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department Forero, Roberto McDonnell, Geoff Gallego, Blanca McCarthy, Sally Mohsin, Mohammed Shanley, Chris Formby, Frank Hillman, Ken Review Article The hospitalisation and management of patients at the end-of-life by emergency medical services is presenting a challenge to our society as the majority of people approaching death explicitly state that they want to die at home and the transition from acute care to palliation is difficult. In addition, the escalating costs of providing care at the end-of-life in acute hospitals are unsustainable. Hospitals in general and emergency departments in particular cannot always provide the best care for patients approaching end-of-life. The main objectives of this paper are to review the existing literature in order to assess the evidence for managing patients dying in the emergency department, and to identify areas of improvement such as supporting different models of care and evaluating those models with health services research. The paper identified six main areas where there is lack of research and/or suboptimal policy implementation. These include uncertainty of treatment in the emergency department; quality of life issues, costs, ethical and social issues, interaction between ED and other health services, and strategies for out of hospital care. The paper concludes with some areas for policy development and future research. Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2012 2012-03-06 /pmc/articles/PMC3303563/ /pubmed/22500239 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/486516 Text en Copyright © 2012 Roberto Forero et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Forero, Roberto McDonnell, Geoff Gallego, Blanca McCarthy, Sally Mohsin, Mohammed Shanley, Chris Formby, Frank Hillman, Ken
spellingShingle	Forero, Roberto McDonnell, Geoff Gallego, Blanca McCarthy, Sally Mohsin, Mohammed Shanley, Chris Formby, Frank Hillman, Ken A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
author_facet	Forero, Roberto McDonnell, Geoff Gallego, Blanca McCarthy, Sally Mohsin, Mohammed Shanley, Chris Formby, Frank Hillman, Ken
author_sort	Forero, Roberto
title	A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
title_short	A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
title_full	A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
title_fullStr	A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
title_full_unstemmed	A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department
title_sort	literature review on care at the end-of-life in the emergency department
description	The hospitalisation and management of patients at the end-of-life by emergency medical services is presenting a challenge to our society as the majority of people approaching death explicitly state that they want to die at home and the transition from acute care to palliation is difficult. In addition, the escalating costs of providing care at the end-of-life in acute hospitals are unsustainable. Hospitals in general and emergency departments in particular cannot always provide the best care for patients approaching end-of-life. The main objectives of this paper are to review the existing literature in order to assess the evidence for managing patients dying in the emergency department, and to identify areas of improvement such as supporting different models of care and evaluating those models with health services research. The paper identified six main areas where there is lack of research and/or suboptimal policy implementation. These include uncertainty of treatment in the emergency department; quality of life issues, costs, ethical and social issues, interaction between ED and other health services, and strategies for out of hospital care. The paper concludes with some areas for policy development and future research.
publisher	Hindawi Publishing Corporation
publishDate	2012
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3303563/
_version_	1611513882462912512

A Literature Review on Care at the End-of-Life in the Emergency Department

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