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CAPC Palliative Care Discussion Forum
Designing a Program
Virtual Palliative Care UnitDate: Dec 27, 2007 11:07 am
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| Re:Virtual Palliative Care Unit (by lynceronsky on 02/20/2008)
David Weissman MD will present a CAPC audioconference on March 19, 1:30 to 2:30 ET on virtual palliative care units. The volume and type of patients you see on your consultation service will help identify the volume of patients who could be cared for on a palliative care unit. What is the LOS on your service, are patients usually discharged to home hospice, what are the main reasons for consultation, etc. Palliative care should be involved with each unit patient. These units are helpful for patients with acute symptom management needs, becasue the staff is educated and comfortable with pallaitive therapies. With a virtual unit, you could start small and increase as demand increases.
Lyn Ceronsky, MS, APRN, BC
System Director
Fairview Health System
Palliative Care Leadership Center
Minneapolis, MN
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| Re:Virtual Palliative Care Unit (by PCaines on 02/20/2008)
As Lyn referenced in her reply to you, please also see the below link for more information about the upcoming CAPC audio conference on the topic of, "Developing the Inpatient Virtual Care Unit" with Dr. David Weissman.
See this link:
http://www.capc.org/support-from-capc/audio-conf/03-19-08-audio/index_html/
I hope this is also a resource to you.
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| Re:Virtual Palliative Care Unit (by Weissman on 02/21/2008)
You have several questions in this post--I'll do my best to answer:
1. The term virtual unit is used to describe a physical location where specialized PC can be provided, but the beds can swing between PC and non-PC uses. The question of how many many beds are likely to be used by PC will depend on how you plan to use them--the criteria for moving/admitting a patient. For a hospital with an ADC of 500, you should expect 250--500 consults in the first year of operation, if your program is fully staffed. How many go to the virtual unit is variable--it's your choice on setting the admitting criteria--I will discuss this on the audioconference.
2. Automatic consult--for the unit to function properly, there needs to be oversight by the PC team. So, any patient admitted to unit must have a PC consult, this of course assumes that the primary MD retains their role and the PC staff are consultants.
3. The same unit at our hospital that houses the PC virtual unit, is also the unit that provides inpatient nursing care for all Sickle Cell patients. However, that is a separate program from Palliative Care; we do not see those patients unless specifically consulted--they are operationally distinct programs, but provided by the same nursing staff.
David E. Weissman, MD
Professor and Director of Palliative Care
Medical College of Wisconsin
Palliative Care Leadership Center (Faculty)
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| Re:Virtual Palliative Care Unit (by tcousounis on 02/24/2008)
I'm curious what is driving the consideration of setting up a virtual PC unit. it's been my experience that PC units, virtual or dedicated, succeed when they are created as a "solution" to a very specific problem that can ONLY be addressed by creating such a unit.
I'm sure Dr. Weissman will be covering these issues - offline, I'd be happy to share with you our observations and conclusions from years of study and experience.
Tim Cousounis, MDvantage Palliative Care Group
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