Palliative Care and Serious Illnesses

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a new report Models and Strategies to Integrate Palliative Care Principles into Care for People with Serious Illness: Proceedings of a Workshop The website explains the purpose of the workshop

The Roundtable on Quality Care for People with Serious Illness hosted a full-day workshop on April 27, 2017 to explore Models and Strategies to Integrate Palliative Care Principles into Care for People with Serious Illness. The workshop aimed to highlight innovative models of community-based care for people of all ages facing serious illness. The workshop featured invited presentations and panel discussions exploring community-based palliative care from a population health management perspective as well as a health system perspective; pediatric palliative care, concurrent care, and palliative care within the context of a multispecialty accountable care organization; potential policy levers, as well as the challenges and opportunities to scale and spread successful palliative care models and programs. The workshop rapporteurs have prepared this proceedings as a factual summation of the workshop presentations and discussions.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction

Remarkable developments in health promotion and disease treatment and prevention have led to significant improvements in life expectancy throughout the 20th century and into the present. Concurrent with those improvements has been the reality that most Americans will experience a substantial period of time living with serious illness; an estimated 45 million Americans currently are living with one or more chronic conditions (IOM, 2015; NASEM, 2016). Those living with serious illness can be found across the age spectrum and in a broad range of care settings, from pre-birth to geriatric care. Recognizing the need to thoughtfully consider and address the challenges and opportunities to improve care for people of all ages and all stages of a serious illness, the Roundtable on Quality Care for People with Serious Illness serves to convene stakeholders from government, academia, industry, professional associations, nonprofit advocacy organizations, and philanthropies. Inspired by and expanding on the work of the 2014 Institute of Medicine consensus study report Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (IOM, 2015),2 the Roundtable aims to foster ongoing dialogue about critical policy and research issues to accelerate and sustain progress in care for people of all ages experiencing serious illness.

The publication can be read online here or downloaded for free as a pdf.  It can also be purchased as a paperback for $45.