英文摘要 |
Background: The patterns of symptoms among patients admitted to the hospice care ward are areas of limited research. The district hospital at Taoyuan has set the hospice care ward since 2004 and accumulated clinical practice experience. Thus, the aim of this study was to analyze the demographic and clinical characteristics in patients with the first hospitalization of the hospice care ward within five years. Methods: This was a secondary data analysis using patients’ first hospitalization of the hospice care ward data (n = 1,025) between 2005 and 2009 in the district hospital at Taoyuan. The data was analyzed using SPSS 17.0 for the descriptive statistic. Results: The study showed that the average of patients’ age was 64.13 years and the majority was males (56.59%). The average length of stay was 11.75 days. Lung, colorectal, and liver cancer were three most common cancers. The three most common symptoms were dry mouth, poor appetite, and fatigue. The average number of symptoms was 9.87. The reasons for discharge were patients died eath in the hospital (50.9%), being discharged and patients died at home (33.1%), and being discharge with stable disease (13.1%). Conclusions: The patients of hospice care ward have multiple symptoms. More than half of the patients died within seven days after transferring to the ward. Thus, it is difficult for the hospice care team to fully evaluate and manage patient’s symptoms and achieve the goal of palliative care. Future work is needed to address the issues of how to improve the quality of holistic hospice care. |