Background: The emergency department (ED) is increasingly used by patients with life-limiting illness. These patients are frequently admitted to the hospital, where they suffer from poorly controlled symptoms and are often subjected to marginally effective therapies. Palliative care (PC) has emerged as the specialty that cares for patients with advanced illness. PC has been shown to reduce symptoms, improve quality of life, and decrease resource utilization. Unfortunately, most patients who could benefit from PC are never identified. At present, there exists no validated screening tool to identify significant unmet PC needs among ED patients with life-limiting illness.

Background: The Palliative Care and Rapid Emergency Screening (P-CaRES) Project is an initiative intended to improve access to palliative care (PC) among emergency department (ED) patients with lifelimiting illness by facilitating early referral for inpatient PC consultations. In the previous two phases of this project, we derived and validated a novel PC screening tool. This paper reports on the third and final preimplementation phase.

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