Effects of a programme of interventions on regional comprehensive palliative care for patients with cancer: a mixed-methods study

Impact of the Macmillan specialist Care at Home service: a mixed methods evaluation across six sites

“…Moreover, there is little research that has formally evaluated or researched the impact of specialised interventions into home care. One exception is Morita et al [68] assessing a comprehensive programme of interventions for specialist palliative care for people with cancer. This showed an increase in home deaths and patients and family members reported that quality of care increased.…”

Outcome Evaluation of the Palliative Care Emphasis Program on Symptom Management and Assessment for Continuous Medical Education: Nationwide Physician Education Project for Primary Palliative Care in Japan

“…To improve the results across these domains, other approaches such as creating opportunities to meet the community palliative care team or holding a multidisciplinary conference to develop collaborative relationships among health care workers in the region may be effective. 10 This study had several limitations, the first of which is the potential for response bias. However, we expect that similar results could be obtained because there were no significant differences between the participants responding to the follow-up survey conducted 2 months after the program and those who did not respond to the follow-up survey (Table1).…”

“…In addition, we acknowledge that the limitation of a low response rate is unavoidable in physician-based surveys, because other nationwide surveys as a part of a national strategy performed by the Japanese Medical Association and Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare achieved a similar or lower response rate, that is, 36% and 43%, respectively. 10,11 It is necessary to develop more reliable follow-up systems.…”

Length of home hospice care, family-perceived timing of referrals, perceived quality of care, and quality of death and dying in terminally ill cancer patients who died at home

“…When patients receive home hospice services, therefore, they have to establish entirely new relationships with home-visiting physicians and nurses. Recently, efforts were made in Japan to increase communication and interactions and nurture relationships among physicians at a regional level, such as through whole-region interdisciplinary conferences [40]. A recent study revealed that a display of social intimacy between a hospital physician and home hospice physician was one of the determinants of a family's evaluation of physicians' communication when patients were referred to a home hospice [41].…”