An economic evaluation of an early palliative care intervention among patients with advanced cancer

CONCLUSION: Although early palliative care is often presented as a cost-reducing care service, we could not show a significant effect of the SENS intervention on health care utilisation and costs in the last month of life. However, it may be that the intervention was not intensive enough, the timeframe too short or the study population too small for measurable effects. Patients appreciated the intervention. Single-structured early palliative care interventions are easy to implement in clinical practice and present low treatment costs. Further research about the economic impact of early palliative care should focus on extracting large, detailed cost databases showing potential shifts in cost and cost-effectiveness.CLINICAL TRIALS: gov Identifier: NCT01983956.PMID:38579309 | DOI:10.57187/s.3591
Source: Swiss Medical Weekly - Category: General Medicine Authors: Source Type: research