For Clinicians

• Handout for Patients & Families
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Is your patient appropriate for a palliative care referral? A palliative care consultation will assist you in managing complex pain, symptoms, comorbidities, patient/family communication and other issues. The following criteria have been developed to help you assess whether a palliative care consultation would be beneficial to you and your patient.

General Referral Criteria (one or more of the following)

Presence of a serious, chronic illness:

• Declining ability to complete activities of daily living
• Weight loss
• Multiple hospitalizations
• Difficult to control physical or emotional symptoms related to serious medical illness
• Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding prognosis
• Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding goals of care
• Patient or family requests for futile care
• DNR order conflicts
• Use of tube feeding or TPN in cognitively impaired or seriously ill patients
• Limited social support and a serious illness (e.g. homeless, chronic mental illness)
• Patient, family or physician request for information regarding hospice appropriateness
• Patient or family psychological or spiritual distress

Intensive Care Unit Criteria

• Admission from a nursing home in the setting of one or more chronic life-limiting conditions (e.g. dementia)
• Two or more ICU admissions within the same hospitalization
• Prolonged or difficult ventilator withdrawal
• Multi-organ failure
• Consideration of ventilator withdrawal with expected death
• Metastatic cancer
• Anoxic encephalopathy
• Consideration of patient transfer to a long-term ventilator facility
• Family distress impairing surrogate decision-making

Oncology Criteria

• Metastatic or locally advanced cancer progressing despite systemic treatments with or without weight loss and functional decline;
  • Karnofsky < 50 or ECOG > 3
  • Progressive brain metastases following radiation
  • New spinal cord compression or neoplastic meningitis
  • Malignant hypercalcemia
  • Progressive pleural/peritoneal or pericardial effusions
  • Failure of first or second-line chemotherapy
  • Multiple painful bone metastases
  • Consideration of interventional pain management procedures
  • Severe prolonged pancytopenia in the setting of an untreatable hematological problem (e.g. relapsed leukemia)

Emergency Department Criteria

• Multiple recent prior hospitalization with same symptoms/problems
• Long-term care patient with Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) and/or Comfort Care (CC) orders
• Patient previously enrolled in a home or residential hospice program
• Patient/caregiver/physician desires hospice but has not been referred
• Consideration of ICU admission and or mechanical ventilation in a patient
  • with metastatic cancer and declining function
  • with moderate to severe dementia
  • with one or more chronic diseases and poor functional status at baseline

Additional resources on palliative care:

For information on the development of palliative care programs in hospitals, visit the Center to Advance Palliative Care at www.capc.org.

Access the National Consensus Project (NCP) Guidelines at www.nationalconsensusproject.org.

Access the National Quality Forum (NQF), National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative and Hospice Care Quality at www.qualityforum.org.

To find Palliative Care in your area, visit the Provider Directory.

To access palliative care resources for clinicians, visit Clinician Resources.