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Resource utilisation and costs of palliative cancer care in an interdisciplinary health care model

¹ Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
² University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
³ McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
⁴ College of Family Physicians of Canada, Mississauga, Ontario

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

	Abstract

This paper presents a detailed description of health care resource utilisation and costs of a pilot interdisciplinary health care model of palliative home care in Ontario, Canada. The descriptive evaluation entailed examining the use of services and costs of the pilot program: patient demographics, length of stay broken down by disposition (discharged, alive, death), access to services/resources, use of family physician and specialist services, and drug use. There were 434 patients included in the pilot program. Total costs were approximately CAN$2.4 million, and the cost per person amounted to approximately CAN$5586.33 with average length of stay equal to over 2 months (64.22 days). One may assume that length of stay would be influenced by the amount of service and support available. Future research might investigate whether in-home palliative home care is the most cost effective and suitable care setting for those patients requiring home care services for expected periods of time.

Key Words: costs, health care costs, palliative care, program evaluation

First published on April 7, 2009, doi:10.1177/0269216309103193

Palliative Medicine 2009;23:448.

A more recent version of this article appeared on July 1, 2009


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