0000000000023984
AUTHOR
Chiara Mastroianni
Inequity in palliative care service full utilisation among patients with advanced cancer: a retrospective Cohort study.
Background: Advanced cancer patients often die in hospital after receiving needless, aggressive treatment. Although palliative care improves symptom management, barriers to accessing palliative care services affect its utilisation, and such disparities challenge the equitable provision of palliative care. This study aimed to identify which factors are associated with inequitable palliative care service utilisation among advanced cancer patients by applying the Andersen Behavioural Model of Health Services Use.Material and methods: This was a retrospective cohort study using administrative healthcare data. A total of 13,656 patients residing in the Lazio region of Italy, who died of an advan…
Palliative care quality indicators in Italy. What do we evaluate?
Purpose In recent years, the number of palliative service providers has increased significantly. This expansion necessitates an evaluation in order to provide the basis for quality improvement of the care. Policymakers, managers of palliative care programs, and others committed to the improvement of end-of-life care need methods and criteria to measure and evaluate the care delivered. As quality measurement is expensive and difficult to undertake, it is fundamental that quality measures evaluate the right things. Quality evaluation in Italy is supported by health authorities who have developed some indicators of palliative care. The aims of this study were to give an overview of these indic…
Pain Education in Schools of Nursing: a Survey of the Italian Academic Situation.
Introduction: Proper assessment of pain is imperative for the development of an effective pain management plan and is a core responsibility of nurses and healthcare professionals. This article describes the contents of Italian on-line bachelor's in nursing degree programs, with particular focus on pain management.Method: A descriptive study was made on curricula published and available on-line in Italian Nursing Schools, and the concordance with the standards set by the Consensus Curriculum on Pain for Nursing ofthe International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP, 2015) was analyzed.Results: Of all the bachelor programs published on-line, 42.6% offered programs and courses specificall…
Translation and Testing of the Italian Version of FAMCARE-2: Measuring Family Caregivers' Satisfaction With Palliative Care.
Family satisfaction is an important outcome of palliative care and is a critical measure for health care professionals to address when assessing quality of care. The FAMCARE-2 is a widely used measure of family satisfaction with the health care received by both patient and family in palliative care. In this study, a team of Italian researchers culturally adapted the FAMCARE-2 to the Italian language and psychometrically tested the instrument by measuring satisfaction of 185 family caregivers of patients admitted into two palliative care services. FAMCARE-2 showed excellent levels of internal consistency (Cronbach’s α coefficient = .96) and test–retest reliability ( r = .98, p < .01). Th…
Validity and reliability of the Palliative Care Transition Measure for Caregivers (PCTM-C).
AbstractObjectivePatients suffering from advanced disease face different care transitions. The transition from acute to palliative care is challenging and may lead to the discontinuity of care. Family caregivers become important sources of information, as patients begin to experience difficulties in coping with emotional transition events. The Care Transition Measure was developed to evaluate care transitions as experienced by the elderly. It has never been used in palliative care. The aim of this study was to test the validity and reliability of a modified version of the Palliative Care Transition Measure, specifically the Palliative Care Transition Measure for Caregivers (PCTM-C).MethodTh…
Economic Consequences of Investing in Anti-HCV Antiviral Treatment from the Italian NHS Perspective: A Real-World-Based Analysis of PITER Data
OBJECTIVE:\ud We estimated the cost consequence of Italian National Health System (NHS) investment in direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy according to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment access policies in Italy.\ud \ud METHODS:\ud A multistate, 20-year time horizon Markov model of HCV liver disease progression was developed. Fibrosis stage, age and genotype distributions were derived from the Italian Platform for the Study of Viral Hepatitis Therapies (PITER) cohort. The treatment efficacy, disease progression probabilities and direct costs in each health state were obtained from the literature. The break-even point in time (BPT) was defined as the period of time required for the cumulativ…
Palliative Care Education in Undergraduate Nursing Curriculum in Italy
Worldwide, more than 19 million people require palliative care because of an advanced stage of disease. Undergraduate nursing education should include palliative care as the European consensus suggests. In 2004, the European Society of Palliative Care issued a guide for the development of palliative nurse education in Europe. This study aims to describe the extension and characteristics of palliative care education within all of the nursing degree curricula in Italy, as well as to what extent their topics match the European Society of Palliative Care guide. A descriptive study was conducted through the universities web pages. For each degree, the curricula of the academic years from 2010 to…