Practical guidelines for developing new palliative care services: resource management

The data are relatively clear cut that palliative care improves quality of life and symptom control, improves quality of care by reducing aggressive but unsuccessful end of life care, and reduces costs. That should be an easy message to deliver to the public, health care administrators, payers, and governments. In fact, the arguments to develop palliative care services must be clear and concise, and make the clinical and financial case for the services that the palliative care team wants to deliver. Here, we discuss some of the types of models including consult services, outpatient programs, and inpatient units; the important components; some easy to use screening tools; components of the consultation team; a model medical record that increases "prompts" to do best palliative care; and data to report to supervisors.