Evaluating Palliative Care : Establishing the Evidence Base

The book contains black-and-white illustrations.

The past thirty years has seen a huge expansion in the provision of palliative care services. Because Palliative Medicine is a multidisciplinary specialty - combining the expertise of oncologists, anaesthetists, nurses, and many other therapeutic groups, the effectiveness of such treatment can be very difficult to measure. Additionally, research involving terminally ill patients and their carers can also present a number of practical and ethical problems. In spite of this, current health policy demands evidence of effectiveness and value for money of health service interventions at all levels of complexity, including the service level. Evaluating Palliative Care: Establishing the Evidence Base provides an introduction to the theory and practice of the evaluation of palliative care services. It examines the methodological issues involved in the evaluation of palliative care, and outlines a practical approach that is readily applicable to many other health care interventions. In particular, research issues involving terminally ill patients and their carers are analysed and discussed, and approaches suggested for future work.

Lisa Stepp

This book provides an evaluation of the worth of current trends in end of life and palliative care. "The author's stated purpose is to evaluate the different aspects of palliative care research. Palliative care is a field of medicine that cries out for this type of study, since many of its standards have not been thoroughly researched or substantiated. This makes the objectives of this text noteworthy. "It is written for health service researchers and clinicians interested in carrying out applied research. Although the author is not a healthcare professional, her expertise in research and her experience as a social anthropologist make her highly credible and qualified to address this issue. "The book covers issues ranging from how to perform evaluation research to the actual evaluation of individual research studies that have been conducted on different issues in palliative care. These issues include caregiver support, attitudes toward palliative care, and cost analysis. Although the text is written at an audience appropriate level, a basic knowledge of research and study designs is necessary to fully comprehend this information. "One of the most difficult questions facing clinicians today is how to move information from the research arena to clinical practice. The author offers a way to achieve this through an evaluation process that can be used on both qualitative and quantitative research studies. Although other books offer reports of research, none provide a systematic way to evaluate the research. This is a timely and useful text for educators, administrators, researchers, and advanced clinicians.

Dr Margaret Robbins is based at the Department of Palliative Medicine, Bristol Oncology Centre, University of Bristol, UK. She has spent the last decade researching various aspects of care for the dying and the bereaved and evaluating palliative care.