RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Specialist palliative care, psychology, interstitial lung disease (ILD) multidisciplinary team meeting: a novel model to address palliative care needs
JF BMJ Open Respiratory Research
JO BMJ Open Resp Res
FD British Thoracic Society
SP e000360
DO 10.1136/bmjresp-2018-000360
VO 5
IS 1
A1 Shaney L Barratt
A1 Michelle Morales
A1 Toby Speirs
A1 Khaled Al Jboor
A1 Heather Lamb
A1 Sarah Mulholland
A1 Adrienne Edwards
A1 Rachel Gunary
A1 Patricia Meek
A1 Nikki Jordan
A1 Charles Sharp
A1 Clare Kendall
A1 Huzaifa I Adamali
YR 2018
UL http://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/5/1/e000360.abstract
AB Introduction Patients with progressive idiopathic fibrotic interstitial lung disease (ILD), such as those with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), can have an aggressive disease course, with a median survival of only 3–5 years from diagnosis. The palliative care needs of these patients are often unmet. There are calls for new models of care, whereby the patient’s usual respiratory clinician remains central to the integration of palliative care principles and practices into their patient’s management, but the optimal model of service delivery has yet to be determined.Methods We developed a novel, collaborative, multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting between our palliative care, psychology and ILD teams with the principal aim of integrating specialist care to ensure the needs of persons with ILD, and their caregivers were identified and met by referral to the appropriate service. The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of this novel MDT meeting on the assessment of a patient’s palliative care needs.Results Significant increases in advance care planning discussions were observed, in conjunction with increased referrals to community courses and teams, following introduction of this novel MDT.Conclusions Our results suggest that our collaborative MDT is an effective platform to address patients’ unmet palliative care needs. Further work is required to explore the effect of our model on achieving the preferred place of death and reductions in unplanned hospital admissions.