Tracker: a framework to support reducing rework through decision management

Abstract

With an aging population and limited health care resources, reflection on end-of-life care is essential. While terminally ill cancer patients spend much of their last year in the home, the literature reveals that the majority of these patients would also prefer to die at home. Despite patients' and families' cited preference for home deaths, dying at home continues to be infrequent. In Edmonton's Capital Health Region (CHR) only 16% of cancer patients died at home in 1999. While many reasons for the low incidence of home death are cited, little data exists regarding discharges from the palliative home care program in the CHR. As such, it is difficult to assess where resources are needed in the community. The implementation of a discharge assessment tool for use in the Capital Health Palliative Home Care program may provide insight into potential correlates of home death. Not only providing information on individual patients, the inclusion of such data in the palliative home care database would allow for trends to be monitored over time.