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Palliative Care Referral System (PCRS) for Cancer Patients With Advanced Disease

NCT04936568 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 380

Last updated 2025-07-08

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Early palliative care (EPC) in the clinical pathway of advanced cancer patients improves symptom control, quality of life and has a positive impact on overall quality of care. EPC contributes to realistic and attainable goals of treatment, facilitating patient choices, favouring adequate communication with patients and families and assessing patient values and preferences with regard to advance care planning. EPC is likely to promote a more appropriate use of health care resources and less aggressive cancer treatment in the last weeks of life. At present standardised criteria for appropriate referral for EPC in oncology outpatients setting are lacking. Therefore the aim of this project is to identify referral criteria and procedures to implement appropriate EPC for advanced patients (the Palliative Care Referral System) and test them in a pre-post experimental design evaluating their impact on quality of care and on the use of healthcare resources. A quasi-experimental, longitudinal, pretest-posttest study will be carried out. Two different cohorts of 150 advanced cancer patients each will be enrolled before (pretest) and after (posttest) the introduction of the PCRS in outpatient clinics of a Comprehensive Cancer Centre. Eligible patients will undergo patient-reported outcome measure (PROMs) evaluation at baseline and then monthly for at least 6 months from enrollment or till death. Use health care resources and quality of care indicators will be collected monthly by a dedicated research nurse.

Conditions

Interventions

OTHER

Palliative Care Referral System - PCRS

Implementation of a system to help oncologists to identify criteria for referring patients to specialized outpatient palliative care (Palliative Care Referral System - PCRS)

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milano

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Augusto T Caraceni, MD · Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milano

Study Design

Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Purpose
HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-07-14
Primary Completion
2024-09-18
Completion
2024-09-18

Countries

  • Italy

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04936568 on ClinicalTrials.gov