Palliative care quality measures: an exploratory study

The aim of this study was to investigate how palliative care service structures and processes correlate with their outputs and outcomes, measuring the latter respectively in terms of intensity of care and death at home.

The Veneto Regional Health Authorities collected a set of 37 quality indicators for the year 2016, covering the following five dimensions: service integration, service structure, accessibility, professional processes and organisational processes. Their validity was assessed by a panel of 29 palliative care experts. A score was assigned to each indicator on the basis of its relevance. Non-parametric correlations between the care quality indicators and the measures of the palliative care outputs and outcomes were investigated, along with the presence of a monotonic trend in the performance of the local health units (LHU) grouped by 'low', 'medium' or 'high' scores and differences between these groups of LHUs.

The data showed that palliative care service structure and professional processes were the dimensions correlating significantly with the intensity of care coefficient. An increasingly significant statistical trend was found in both the intensity of care coefficient and the proportion of deaths at home for the three groups of LHUs in terms of the professional processes dimension.

Despite its limitations, this study brought to light some statistically significant findings that are worth investigating in larger samples. To achieve improvements in the quality of palliative care, it is important for healthcare providers to know which variables most affect the output and especially the outcomes of the services offered.