Quality end-of-Life cancer care: An overdue imperative

This review assesses the current status of end-of-life care based on large-scale, multiyear nationwide surveys of treatment modality, setting, and cost of care during terminal patients' last months of life. It shows that end-of-life care goals often remain suboptimal. Contributing factors include prioritized life preservation, uneven commitment to palliative care, few palliative care specialists, and perverse financial incentives that encourage costly interventions. Although not determinant per se, these factors coupled to doubts about what constitutes end-of-life can lead to overextended disease treatment and a late implementation of palliative care. In order to bridge the existing gap between care received and care expected and achieve quality end-of-life and promote death with dignity, we propose both to view the person rather than the disease as the unit of care and a pragmatic definition of end-of-life. Such a strategy should facilitate selecting an optimal time to transition from disease-targeted treatment to palliative care.