There is growing consensus in the field over what constitutes high quality palliative care services. Below are resources that describe comprehensive efforts to define quality palliative care.

• ACP Clinical Practice Guidelines: Evidence-Based Interventions to Improve the Palliative Care of Pain, Dyspnea, and Depression at the End of Life: A Clinical Practice Guideline from the American College of Physicians. The ACP produces evidence-based clinical practice guidelines that follow a rigorous development process and are based on the highest quality scientific evidence.
• The National Consensus Project, a consortium of five palliative care organizations, has published Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care. The evidence-based guidelines were developed by representative leaders in the field following a process that invited input from more than 100 experts in palliative care. The guidelines respond to the urgent need for consistently high quality palliative care to care for an aging population with more serious, chronic and advanced illnesses in coming years.
  http://www.nationalconsensusproject.org
  
  
• National Quality Forum Preferred Practices.
  The National Quality Forum has recently identified palliative care and hospice care as national priority areas for healthcare quality improvement. The highly influential NQF report provides a framework and set of NQF-endorsed^TM preferred practices that focus on improving palliative care and hospice care across the Institute of Medicine’s six dimensions of quality – safe, effective, timely, patient-centered, efficient, and equitable. The preferred practices mark a crucial step in the standardization of palliative care and hospice.
  
  
• CAPC has developed the Crosswalk of JCAHO Standards & Palliative Care to provide hospitals with the policy and administrative foundation for delivering palliative care services that are consistent with JCAHO standards.
  
  
• Standards of Practice for Hospice Programs: The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.
  http://www.nhpco.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3274
  
  
• The Joint Commission evaluates and accredits nearly 17,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. An independent, not-for-profit organization, JCAHO is the nation's predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. Since 1951, JCAHO has developed state-of-the-art, professionally based standards and evaluated the compliance of health care organizations against these benchmarks.
  www.jcaho.org
  
  
• The Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association exchanges information, experiences, and ideas to promote understanding of the specialties of hospice and palliative nursing and to study and promote hospice and palliative nursing research. HPNA has developed the following: (1) Scope and Standards of Hospice and Palliative Nursing Practice for the generalist; (2) Advanced Nurse Professional Competencies of the Generalist; (3) Nurse Professional Competencies of the Advanced Practice Nurse; and (4) Professional Competencies of the Nursing Assistant.
  www.hpna.org
  
  
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Conditions of Participation for Hospice.
  http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_01/42cfr418_01.html
  
  
• McGlynn EA, Cassel CK, Leatherman ST et al. Establishing national goals for quality improvement. Medical Care 2003;41:I-16 – I-29.
  
  
• Ferris FD, Balfour HM, Bowen K, Farley J, Hardwick M, Lamontagne C, Lundy M, Syne A, West P. A Model to Guide Hospice Palliative Care. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, 2002.
  
  
• Palliative Care Australia: Development of Performance Indicators for Palliative Care in Australia.
  http://www.pallcare.org.au/publications/indicators/pca_development.html
  
  
• Standards and Quality Committee and Council of Palliative Care Australia, Palliative Care Australia. Resource Manual for Palliative Care Performance Indicators. June 1998 copyright Commonwealth of Australia.
  http://www.pallcare.org.au/publications/indicators/
  
  
• Palliative Care Australia. Standards for Palliative Care Provision, 3rd Edition, 1999.
  
  
• Palliative Care Australia. Report of the National Census of Palliative Care Services for 1998. October 1999.
  
• Clinical Standards Board for Scotland: Clinical Standards for Specialist Palliative Care. CSBS, June 2002.
  
  
• New Zealand Ministry of Health. The New Zealand Palliative Care Strategy. February 2001.
  http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/
  
  
• The Advisory Board, a Compendium of Palliative Best Practices. www.advisory.com. The Advisory Board Company serves a membership of more than 2,600 leading hospitals, health systems, universities and other mission-driven enterprises in the United States and, increasingly, worldwide. It is comprised of 900 researchers, terrain-based experts, hospital administrators, clinicians and consultants, all dedicated to examining the critical issues facing their members and discerning "True North", communicating these insights and best practices with clarity, and providing innovative support such that members can achieve "best in class" performance. They offer an array of professional services—including research, executive education and development, decision-support tools, and consulting—allowing them to target the unique needs of each member institution.