Patterns of Specialty Palliative Consultation for Patients Admitted to Surgical Services

Historically, there have been perceptions that engagement with palliative care (PC) services may preclude potentially curative but high-risk operations. As such, we sought to investigate the relationship between specialty PC consultation and the care trajectory of surgical patients. We hypothesized that PC consultation would be associated with increased frequency of nonoperative treatments being chosen among surgical inpatients. All general surgery and general surgery subspecialty patients receiving PC consultation at a single tertiary academic medical center from 2020 to 2021 were identified. Surgical operations were stratified as "elevated risk" in accordance with 2014 American Heart Association guidelines. Retrospective chart review was performed, and comparisons were made with univariable statistics. We identified a total of 729 patients who received specialty PC consultation, 159 of whom were admitted to a surgical service. PC was actively involved in consultation for surgical decision making in 27% (43/159) of these encounters. PC assistance with surgical decision making was associated with a greater incidence of elevated-risk operative procedures during admission compared with patients without presurgical PC consultation (OR 3.29 [2.51, 7.16]). There was no association between PC involvement with surgical decision making and odds of discharge to hospice (OR 0.42 [0.18, 1.51]) nor death during admission (OR 0.66 [0.21, 2.10]). We found that specialty PC involvement in surgical decision making does not preclude the pursuit of disease-directed surgical treatment. Contrary to our hypothesis, our single institutional data demonstrate that early PC consultation can be synergistic with surgical disease management and does not preclude elevated-risk operative care.