Strategies maintaining hospice and palliative care quality
| Fields influenced | Issues identified | Strategies |
| Inpatient palliative care | Increased psychospiritual suffering. Delayed treatment initiation/withdraw. Availability of part-time therapists. | Introduce real-time video–audio products, electronic recording devices. Appropriate hardware/software support for online meeting. Online self-learning course for spiritual therapy. |
| Palliative home care | Increased home care patients and increased complexity of their conditions. Increased risk of exposure. | Introduce telemedicine. Appropriate manpower resource allocation. Offer palliative home care SOP for reference. |
| Palliative team member stress | Increased work loading, fear of virus infection, inappropriate labelling. | Cautious task assignment. Enhance public health education. |
| Terminal patient consultation | Inconvenience for family meeting arrangement. | Early but timely hospice consultation. Appropriate hardware/software support for online meeting. |
| Terminal patient admission | Time-consuming screening for COVID-19. | Tailored pathway for admission. |
| Patients with COVID-19 | Rapid progressing and unpredictable disease course. | Early but timely hospice consultation. Implementing advanced care planning. |
SOP, standard operation procedure.