You are here

  • Home
  • Online First
  • Palliative care inpatient needs: supportive and palliative care indicator tool survey in Kenya

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Palliative care inpatient needs: supportive and palliative care indicator tool survey in Kenya
  1. Lilian Maithya Kamita1,
  2. Scott A Murray2,
  3. Lawi Njiru1,
  4. Eli Horn1,
  5. Susan Chemutai1 and
  6. Paul Opare-Addo1
  1. 1Chogoria Hospital, Chogoria, Kenya
  2. 2Centre for Population Health Sciences, The Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, Primary Palliative Care Research Group, The University of Edinburgh College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Scott A Murray, Centre for Population Health Sciences, The Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, Primary Palliative Care Research Group, The University of Edinburgh College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh EH8 9AG, UK; scott.murray{at}ed.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2023-004491

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Palliative care needs may be present in up to 40% of patients in hospitals in Africa, but it is reported that few patients are receiving any palliative care, although the WHO call for integration of palliative care in all health service settings.1 We therefore conducted a census in a large rural hospital in Kenya managed by the Presbyterian Church of East Africa to identify what percentage of patients might benefit from palliative care, their diagnoses and what percentage were actually receiving palliative care at the time. A resident doctor at a large faith-based hospital in Kenya on 9 November 2022 reviewed the electronic medical records of all the patients in the medical and surgical wards on that day using the Supportive and Palliative care Indicator Tool adapted to low income settings (SPICT-LIS) to identify patients who would benefit from a palliative care approach.2

    First the patient’s medical history was cross-checked against six ‘general indicators’ of poor or deteriorating health. See copy of SPICT-LIS in online supplemental annex 1 or at www.spict.org.uk/spict-lis/. Then patients who had one of the general indicators were categorised according to their medical diagnoses into one or more 10 ‘clinical indicator groups’. Finally we also examined the medical notes to identify if there was any mention of a palliative care approach in their care. These included …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors LMK and SAM designed the study, and LMK collected the data. All authors contributed to the analysis of the data and contributed to and approved the final draft.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.