Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Measuring performance in End of Life Care within an acute setting is a complex and difficult task. GSF implementation within a hospital setting can improve quality of care, patient satisfaction and an increase in advance care planning. This study aims to show how by developing an internal hospital application and protocol for GSF patients, improved data collection can be transformed from data into intelligence and impact on delivery of high quality, individualised end of life care.
Methods Most wards within Dudley had different ways of capturing GSF identified patients and recorded information manually. Informatics and the Specialist Palliative Care team developed an internal application to monitor all patient admissions against a GSF outcome and to provide additional information such as preferred place of care and ACP. This provided the ward with a visual management tool, easily identifying end of life patients and the ability to capture essential end of life metrics.
Results Since the launch of this application, analysis of the data has demonstrated an increase in the percentage of adult inpatients assessed for GSF and currently using this information for targeted education and learning. As of the 30th September 2019, the three front runner wards had a combined assessment rate of 90.2% Through this log, other metrics broken down by ward include identification rate, percentage of patients who achieve their preferred place of care and how many have an individualised plan of care in place or offered ACP.
Conclusion Initial results indicate that having an electronic centralised database for monitoring GSF outcomes provides a platform to scrutinise key metrics for end of life care, which enable the wards and specialist palliative care team to ensure high quality end of life care is achieved.