The Palliative Medication Kit: An Effective Way of Extending Care in the Home for Patients Nearing Death
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Palliative medication kits for home use were developed in order to extend the period of time terminally ill patients might be cared for in their homes. DESIGN: Kits containing medications that could be used when the oral route was lost, targeting common symptoms that result in hospital admissions, were placed in homes of terminally ill patients. SETTING: Regional health authority, urban setting, community-based palliative care. POPULATION: Patients receiving care in the community, anticipated to die within the next 2 weeks and wishing to be cared for at home as long as possible. INTERVENTION: Kits were used when patients were experiencing symptom escalation or crisis, and the drugs to manage these were otherwise not available. Community palliative care nurses recommended when to open the kit and received verbal orders from the supervising palliative care physician for the medications to be administered. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Number of kits placed and opened and the prevalence of home death in those instances; the number of kits placed and not opened and the prevalence of home death in those instances. RESULTS: From 2002-2007, a total of 293 kits were placed in patients' homes and used. Two hundred fifty-eight patients (88%) died at home, compared to 24% who died outside of an acute care setting across the entire program (chi(2) = 579.71; p < 0.0001). In 2006-2007, 73 kits were placed but not used. Forty-four patients (60%) died at home, compared to a program home death rate of 27% (chi(2) = 60.70; p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Palliative medication kits are a simple and effective way of anticipating and addressing comfort and symptom control for dying patients being cared for in the community. These kits can avert institutional crisis admissions, extend the period of time patients can be cared for in their homes and may increase the likelihood of a home death.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".