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Home palliative medicine: an audit of weekend and public holiday telephones on-call
  1. Sebastiano Mercadante1,
  2. Giuseppe Bellavia2 and
  3. Giuseppe Intravaia2
  1. 1Pain Relief and Supportive Care, La Maddalena Cancer Center, Palermo, Palermo, Italy
  2. 2Società Assistenza Malati Oncologici Terminali, Palermo, Italy
  1. Correspondence to Professor Sebastiano Mercadante, Pain Relief and Supportive Care, La Maddalena Cancer Center, Palermo, Palermo, Italy; 03sebelle{at}gmail.com

Abstract

Objectives To report the on-call activity of a well-established home care programme.

Methods The charts of consecutive phone calls recorded in the weekend or public holidays were reviewed.

Results The principal reason to call were based on caregivers’ uncertainty, for the need of information or just to be reassured. The other more frequent reason to call was related to technical problems with peripheral intravenous central catheters.

Conclusions An integrated system of ‘on call’ allows to select the interventions, covering most of the patients’ needs.

  • Home Care
  • Home Care Services
  • Service evaluation
  • Supportive care

https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2023-004578

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @#SebMercadante

    • Contributors SM: conception or design of the work, analysis or interpretation of data for the work, drafting the work, final approval of the version to be published; GI: acquisition, revising the work, final approval of the version to be published; GMB: acquisition, revising the work, final approval of the version to be published, questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. SM is responsible for the overall content as guarantor. The guarantor accepts full responsibility for the finished work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision to publish.

    • 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.