Developing a pediatric palliative care service in a large urban hospital: challenges, lessons, and successes

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Palliative Care
• Healthcare Service Development
• Hospital Administration

Background:

• Establishment of a new palliative care service in a large, urban children's hospital.
• Focus on developing an inpatient consultation service.
• Reporting on challenges, lessons learned, and evaluation strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• Provide a detailed guide for developing inpatient palliative care consultation services.
• Document the process, challenges, and lessons learned during service creation.
• Evaluate the initial phase of the palliative care service.

Main Methods:

• Examined personnel hiring and marketing strategies.
• Utilized a clinical database for quality review and trend identification.
• Conducted a survey to assess provider satisfaction and referring physician utilization.

Main Results:

• Pilot phase established documentation templates and identified key data for tracking growth.
• Delineation of team members and roles was clarified.
• Provider satisfaction survey provided an initial evaluation but lacked generalizability due to low response rate.

Conclusions:

• The pilot phase successfully laid groundwork for service improvement through documentation and data tracking.
• Further research is needed, including expanding surveys to patients/families and assessing financial benefits.
• Refining survey techniques is necessary for more robust evaluation of pediatric palliative care services.