How to Evaluate Hospital Care in the Dying Phase-Development of a Data Extraction Tool for Retrospective Medical Record Analysis.

Background: Hospitals are the most common place of death in European countries, including Germany, where nearly half of the population dies in hospitals, mostly outside specialised palliative care wards. At the same time, quality of hospital care in the dying phase is reported as poor. Although existing (inter-)national guidelines provide outcome variables, their evaluation of implementation is lacking.

Formative evaluation of an employee-driven approach to improve care in the dying phase in hospitals.

Objectives: The hospital setting is often perceived as slow to change. While employee-driven approaches offer a promising alternative to traditional top-down methods, guidance is limited. This study provides a description and formative evaluation of an employee-driven working group (WG) approach to tailor ward-specific measures to improve care in the dying phase.

Healthcare Professionals' Perceived Burden Related to Care in the Dying Phase - Results of a Cross-Sectional Explorative Study on General Wards and Intensive Care Units.

Most patients dying in hospitals die outside of specialist palliative care, making healthcare professionals of all disciplines responsible for the care of the dying. This cross-sectional study assessed how burdened healthcare professionals on non-palliative care hospital wards are when caring for dying patients. Descriptive and inferential statistics (chi and tests) were used to analyze the data.

Dying in hospital: a retrospective medical record analysis on care in the dying phase in intensive care units and general wards.

Background: Care in the dying phase is often suboptimal in hospitals outside specialized palliative care. Studies of the implementation of recommendations for care in the dying phase are rare. Medical records can provide information in this regard.

Care for the Dying: A Scoping Review of Measures for Clinical Practice With Qualitative Synthesis.

The literature describes a plethora of different measures to support healthcare professionals in the care for the dying. The aim is the identification and assessment of measures for the care in the dying phase to give healthcare professionals of all disciplines an overview on such measures in form of a self-developed toolkit. Two databases were searched systematically and all measures found ( = 7368 publications, = 308 measures) were categorized into six categories and integrated into a toolkit.

Dying in hospital in Germany - optimising care in the dying phase: study protocol for a multi-centre bottom-up intervention on ward level.

Background: Hospitals are globally an important place of care for dying people and the most frequent place of death in Germany (47%), but at the same time, the least preferred one - for both patients and their relatives. Important indicators and outcome variables indexing quality of care in the dying phase are available, and various proposals to achieve corresponding quality objectives exist. However, they are not yet sufficiently adapted to the heterogeneous needs of individual hospital wards.