A team of the Department of Palliative Medicine has successfully completed the EQuIP (Enable Quality Improve Patient Care) – An India-Stanford Quality Improvement Collaborative of National Cancer Grid (NCG) for 2023-2024. The title of the project undertaken by the team was “Opting out from Home Care Services: Reasons to Deny Convenience”.
The Home care service of Palliative Medicine has entered 6th year of its existence. Opting out from the service by the patients after one or two home visits hamper the project goal of the service. With the leadership of Dr K Bhagabati, the team had set a goal to decrease the opting out percentage from 32.88% to 15%.
The team had meticulously found out the several issues coined by the patients and relatives for not continuing the services. To solve the issues, the team restructured their process map, found out the points for a fishbone analysis and the key drivers. The interventions like - Cancer awareness in society, empowering the patients and caregivers, generation and empowerment of volunteers, contacting local physician/pharmacist/nurse who can act as first contact carer/handle emergency situation, contacting local hospital for emergency procedure/service/admission etc., contacting NGO’s and volunteers, providing dedicated home care phone number/helpline numbers for emergency service etc. were started to tackle the issues raised by the patients and family members. Within a span of three months, the percentage of patients who opt out came down from 32.88% to 9.63%.
The team has chalked out a sustain plan for the project. Dr Sarbani Laskar of TMH Mumbai mentored the team to achieve the targeted goal.