Outpatient palliative care effectiveness: both patients and caregivers can gain

Outpatient palliative care services are increasing in their effectiveness worldwide, because they can better focus on both patients' and caregivers' needs at all stages of the disease requiring this type of interventions. This was demonstrated before by various studies that,however, were performed mostly on patients with malignancies and thatyielded encouraging results about the severity of the symptoms and about the burden of care in the caregivers. In this analysis performed on a mixture of patients with malignant and nonmalignant diseases, Groh et al. demonstrate that the outpatient team intervention was able to reduce the severity of symptoms such as pain or digestive symptoms and were able to minimize the burden of care of the primary caregivers.