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CAPC Palliative Care Discussion Forum
Staffing
Staffing for APNAuthor: SandraK
Date: Jul 17, 2012 10:00 am
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The average case load for an APN depends on a number of factors. These include clinical experience of the APN/comfort with palliative care; whether the APN is a member of a team with physician, social work and chaplaincy support; stage of the program; support from unit staff; type of consultations. Approximately 200-250/consults per fte is used as an estimate for either an APN or MD provider, with annual visits ( new + follow-up) ranging from 750-1000/year/provider. Another way to think about this is to estimate the amount of time for a new consult and follow-up visits, and calculate ranges of patients per day. For example, if a new consult is estimated as one hour and follow-up visit 30 minutes, a clinical day could include 2 new pts (2 hours), one family meeting (1 hour), 5 follow up visits (2.5 hours) to equal a minimum of 5-6 hours of time. In our experience, this would be a busy day.
The National Palliative Care Registry was created to collect information from palliative care programs to allow comparison across settings and begin to answer the kind of question you pose. If you haven't already registered your program, we would strongly encourage you to do so. There is a link on www.capc.org with information about the kind of data you will be asked to submit on an annual basis.
We would also encourage you to consider the non-direct patient care value this APN would contribute such as education for nursing or policy development.
Lyn Ceronsky
Director, Palliative Care
Fairview Health Services
Palliative Care Leadership Center
Minneapolis, MN