Abstract
Aim: The aim of the study was the quality assessment of palliative care counseling teams activities within the pilot project of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic, from the perspective of health professionals in hospitals. The pilot project and research was a part of the program of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic "Palliative Care Support Programme project - increasing the availability of palliative care services in acute and post-acute care hospitals".
The secondary goal is to verify the usability of the Pediatric Advanced Care Team Consult Feedback Survey (PACTCFS) in the Czech hospitals. Method: The Pediatric Advanced Care Team Consult Feedback Survey (CHOP, 2019) scale was translated for the use in czech hospitals to obtain feedback by surveying all relevant staff with experience in the operation of the PCT in the six hospitals (n=752) where the pilot palliative care teams of the MoHCR project "Supporting Palliative Care - Increasing the availability of palliative care services in acute and post-acute care hospitals" operate.
Results: The results of the survey showed the benefit of the palliative teams for health professionals working with patients with a serious life-limiting diagnosis. 86% of them would repeatedly ask for an intervention in the same situation in the future, 83% confirmed that the teams helped to clarify the goals, wishes and preferences of patients and their families, 76% perceived their recommendations on symptom management as useful and 80% of respondents felt that the families were well supported by the PCT. The resulting unidimensional summative scale showed high internal consistency (Cronbach Alpha 0.91).
The sensitivity of the measurement tool is documented by the fact that the PACTCFS identified a difference in the quality of care of individual consilium palliative teams as measured by feedback from health professionals who requested their consilium. Discussion: The Paediatric Advanced Care Team Consult Feedback Survey has emerged as a relevant tool to measure feedback on the work of palliative care consultant teams.
This tool can be used to obtain feedback from hospital staff and to measure its evolution over time. Considering the initial stage of implementation of palliative care in the hospital setting in the country, this tool can also be used as one of the ways to assess the success rate of implementing a new service in an organization.