Morbidity and Mortality Profile of Patients Receiving Palliative Care at a Tertiary Care Centre in Central India: A Descriptive Study

Introduction: Palliative care provides comprehensive support for several dimensions of physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual care needs experienced by patients who live with terminal illnesses. An interdisciplinary professional team supports the broad needs of patients and their care partners and helps them to cope with living with their life limiting illness (es) while proactively planning for the end of life. Aims and Objectives: 1. To understand and analyse the morbidity, mortality and symptom profiles of a cohort of patients with life-limiting disease and receiving palliative care 2. To determine the prevalence of death within palliative care of those patients receiving palliative care. Materials and Methods: Our study is a descriptive exploratory secondary analysis of a patient dataset, wherein we proceeded in accordance with the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) checklist. The study was conducted from 01 Jan 2022 to 31 Aug 2024. Standard management protocol was followed for management of the cases. Data collection was carried out prospectively by means of a pilot research study. The pilot research study followed a community-based participatory research methodology. We carried out a descriptive analysis of the results to estimate the proportion of individuals who passed away during the period of the study while receiving palliative care, or sought palliative care in their last 4 weeks of life. Study participants were grouped by way of symptomatology/organ/system. Results: Our analysis includes 134 study participants from a palliative care centre of a large tertiary care hospital. The study participants comprised of 71 (52.99%) males and 63 (47.01%) females respectively. Mean age of the study participants was 58.05 years (SD 14.85) and median age was 60 years. Mean duration of hospitalisation was 50.55 days (SD 90.06) with a median of 24.5 days. Mean duration of stay in palliative care was 38.29 days (SD 89.22) with a median of 15.5 days. Overall, there were 5131 patient days of stay in palliative care; and 6774 patient days of hospitalisation. From our study sample of 134 study participants, 2 (1.49%) one male and one female died under palliative care.