Staffing in California Public Hospital Palliative Care Clinics: A Report from the California Health Care Foundation Palliative Care in Public Hospitals Learning Community.

Background: Although clinic-based palliative care (PC) services have spread in the United States, little is known about how they function, and no studies have examined clinics that predominantly serve safety net populations. Objectives: To describe the PC clinics operating in safety net institutions in California. Design: Survey completed by PC program leaders Setting/Subjects: PC programs in California, USA, safety net medical centers. Measurements: Descriptive statistics regarding staffing, clinic processes, patients served, and finances. Results: Twelve of 15 programs responded; 10 clinics that met inclusion criteria. All 10 programs use multiple disciplines to deliver care. Average full-time equivalent (FTE) used to staff an average of 2.75 half-day clinics per week includes 0.69 physician FTE, 0.51 nurse practitioner FTE, 1.37 nurse FTE, 0.79 social worker FTE, and 0.52 chaplain FTE. Clinic session schedules include an average of 1.88 new patient appointment slots (standard deviation [SD] = 0.44) and four follow-up appointment slots (SD = 1.95). The nine programs that reported on clinic volumes see 1081 patients annually combined, with an annual average of 120 (SD = 48.53) per program. Encounters per patient averaged 3.04 (SD = 1.59; eight programs reporting). All reported offering seven core PC services: pain/symptom management, comprehensive assessment, care coordination, advance care planning, PC plan of care, emotional support, and social service referrals. An average of 77.4% (SD = 26.81) of clinic financing came from the health systems. Conclusions: Our respondents report using an interdisciplinary team approach to deliver guideline-concordant specialty PC. More research is needed to understand the most effective and efficient staffing models for meeting the PC needs of the safety net population.

Generalist Palliative Care in the California Safety Net: A Structured Assessment to Design Interventions for a Range of Care Settings.

BACKGROUND: To provide high quality care to all patients who have serious illness, health-care systems must develop effective generalist palliative care strategies. OBJECTIVE: To identify palliative care quality gaps within a range of settings in the California safety net and to develop theory-based interventions to address them. DESIGN: Structured assessment using the National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care Clinical Practice Guidelines and a Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational/Environmental Diagnosis and Evaluation intervention planning model-based worksheet, which integrates behavior theories to identify factors that predispose, enable, and reinforce clinicians to perform recommended behaviors. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Adviser pairs-one from palliative care and one from a partner service line-from 10 California public health-care systems conducted assessments at their sites. A steering committee provided educational webinars, best practices, and assessment tools. MEASUREMENTS: Adviser pairs interviewed at least 6 partner service line stakeholders to identify palliative care quality gaps, behaviors clinicians should perform to close gaps, and factors that predispose, enable, and reinforce those behaviors. RESULTS: Partner service lines were primary care (n = 4), surgery (n = 3), emergency department (n = 2), and radiation oncology (n = 1). Selected gaps were advance care planning and goals of care communication (n = 6), identifying patients with serious illness (n = 3), and pain management (n = 1). All sites designed multiple interventions to address gaps, based on factors that predispose, enable, and reinforce a target audience to perform a target behavior. Advisers reported that the program strengthened relationships between palliative care and the partner service line. CONCLUSION: This structured assessment helped busy clinicians develop theory-based generalist palliative care interventions.

Public hospital palliative social work: addressing patient cultural diversity and psychosocial needs.

Through creative practice innovations and a wide range of professional competencies, social work has contributed substantively to the development of the palliative care field (Harper, 2011 ). As the field continues to grow and evolve, new opportunities are emerging to profile palliative social work in diverse health care settings. A statewide initiative to spread palliative care in California's public hospitals provided just such an opportunity. Palliative social workers from six public hospitals participating in the initiative formed a group to discuss palliative social work in this unique hospital setting. This article highlights the group's insights and experiences as they address the significant cultural diversity and psychosocial needs of public hospital patients receiving palliative care.

Addressing depression and accumulated trauma in urban primary care: challenges and opportunities.

This paper explores the presentation of severe depression among patients with accumulated trauma in the context of an urban community health center (primary care clinic) in California, as well as opportunities to address this phenomenon in light of diminished community-based mental health services.

Implementation of the care transitions intervention: sustainability and lessons learned.

PURPOSE: During care transitions, the movement of patients from one healthcare practitioner or setting to another, patients are vulnerable to serious lapses in the quality and safety of their medical care. The Care Transitions Intervention (CTI), a 4-week, low-cost, low-intensity self-management program designed to provide patients discharged from the acute care setting with skills, tools, and the support of a transition coach to ensure that their health and self-management needs are met, was implemented in 10 hospital-community-based partnership sites in California over a 12-month period. Five of the partnerships were hospital-led sites, and 5 were county-led sites. The primary goal of the project was to identify factors that promote sustainability of the intervention by (1) assessing features of each site's implementation and the site's likelihood of continuing the program; (2) soliciting feedback from the sites; and (3) analyzing site and patient characteristic data and data from the CTI measurement instruments (the 3-item Care Transition Measure [CTM-3] and the Patient Activation Assessment [PAA] tool). PRIMARY PRACTICE SETTING(S): The CTI was implemented in 10 California hospital and community-based organizations that received training and technical support to implement the intervention. FINDINGS: Presence of leadership support was determined to be the critical factor for sites reporting interest in and capacity for long-term support of the CTI. Sites identified engaging hospital- and community-based leaders, providing additional transition coach training, and the assigning of consistent and dedicated (funded) transition coaches as valuable lessons learned. Key findings from the measurement instruments indicate that future CTI implementations should focus on medication management, patients with cardiovascular conditions and diabetes, patients older than 85 years, and African American and Latino patients. Mean PAA scores were moderately higher for patients from hospital-led sites than for patients from county-led sites and moderately higher for patients from sites with full plans for continuation than for patients from sites with partial or minor plans to continue the CTI. IMPLICATIONS FOR CASE MANAGEMENT PRACTICE: This implementation of the CTI, with its flexible design responsive to the diverse needs of patients, hospitals, and community organizations, provides a host of real-world lessons on how to improve and sustain effective patient transitions between care settings. Healthcare systems interested in improving care transitions have a compelling reason to explore the viability of implementing the intervention with attention to developing or addressing the following: strong care transitions leadership; collaborative hospital-community partnerships; the particular needs of diverse communities; patient-level medication reconciliation and management; and tailoring the model to the unique needs of patients with cardiovascular conditions and diabetes.

Older women with breast cancer: caregiving and the risk of depression--an exploratory analysis.

OBJECTIVES: The primary objective of this exploratory analysis was to assess the prevalence of caregiving among older (60+) newly diagnosed female breast cancer patients and to examine the risk of depression associated with breast cancer, caregiving, and age, at 3 months and 12 months after diagnosis. METHODS: Data from interviews conducted for the case-control study, Health and Functioning in Women with Breast Cancer (HFW), were used for this analysis. Interviews were conducted at 3 months and 12 months post-diagnosis. Participants for this analysis were restricted to those who completed both interviews (cases n = 904; controls n = 966). Risk of depression was assessed using a self-reported depression question from the HFW instrument. RESULTS: The multivariate analysis showed that stage of breast cancer was significantly related to depression among older women with breast cancer while controlling for various socio-demographic factors; however, caregiving did not significantly increase the risk for depression for this population. DISCUSSION: A breast cancer diagnosis for women, regardless of age or caregiving status, presented an increased risk of depression at 3 and 12 months post-diagnosis. These and other findings and their implications for social work practice are discussed.

Parkinson's disease caregiving: implications for care management.

The primary objective of this study was to identify the needs of caregivers of individuals with Parkinson's disease within the context of the common functional, memory, and behavioral problems experienced by Parkinson's patients. A second objective was to evaluate any differences between caregivers of Parkinson's patients and caregivers of adults with other forms of cognitive impairment. Data used for this analysis were collected in 1999, by the 11 Caregiver Resource Centers that form California's statewide Caregiver Resource Center system, as part of the uniform caregiver assessment process. Parkinson's disease caregivers requested assistance with emotional support, respite, and behavior management. Compared with caregivers of non-Parkinson's patients served by the CRC system, caregivers of Parkinson's patients were primarily older, entered the CRC system later, and demonstrated increased depression and other health conditions.

An exploratory qualitative analysis of the emotional impact of breast cancer and caregiving among older women.

Using in-depth qualitative interviews, this exploratory analysis evaluated the emotional impact of breast cancer on seven older women caring for others at the time of their breast cancer diagnosis. Stress--not depression as hypothesized--was identified as a primary issue for the women in their struggle to balance caregiving responsibilities and health needs. Modified by the caregiver-care recipient relationship and the type and amount of care provided, participants' experience with stress was influenced by a host ofphysical emotional, economic, and environmental factors. Life course pattern similarities represented another compelling emergent theme in the study. Participants shared similar characteristics and experiences during their lives, leading them through common pathways to the dual status of caregiver and breast cancer patient. Findings from this preliminary analysis support the need for more extensive research in this area as well as heightened awareness among social workers and care managers of the unique stressors experienced by older women breast cancer patients caring for others.