A survey on effectiveness of palliative home care services provided by Malabar Cancer Center

Introduction:Palliative homecare offers a number of added psychological benefits to the terminal patient as the physical home environment enhances the patient’s independence,and quality of life, as the home is the place of familarity and comfort.Also studies report that 60 -70% of people would, given the chance,and the possibility of good care,prefer to remain at home under the family doctor.

**Aim:**To find out the effectiveness of homecare service provided for the needy patients coming to the Cancer Palliative Medicine department of Malabar Cancer Center.

Materials and Method:All the patients who received homecare during the period from February 2012 to August 2013, in the department of Cancer Palliative Medicine of Malabar Cancer Center will be included in the study.A total of 112 patients will be included in the study.Using the Patient outcome scale(POS) pain, other symptoms and psychological well being will be assessed (on a likert scale)and the overall satisfaction and the extend of warmth and care the patient felt with the homecare team will be assessed on a 0-10 scale(where 0 stands for not at all satisfied and 10 stands for highly satisfied.The assessment will be done in the first visit and thereafter in the subsequent visits every 2 weeks,

**Results:**The results will be analysed using GLM repeated measure analysis .