Early Palliative Care Integration in Interventional Cancer Care

The purpose of this project is to conduct a mixed-methods study of the impact of early integration of palliative care in interventional oncology on three outcomes of interest:

1. caregiver well-being, 2) patient physical and psychosocial outcomes, and 3) health services utilization and costs. Palliative care focuses on providing patients with serious illnesses and their families with physical, emotional, social, practical, and spiritual support. Recent trials examining the integration of palliative care in cancer care have individually shown improvement in patient symptoms and quality of life, reduction of caregiver burden, and/or health services costs. These studies, however, have not collectively analyzed these impacts.Further, a recent study shows that integrating palliative care early in lung cancer care has proven beneficial to both patients and caregivers. Given the potential of this previous body of research, the proposed study offers a comprehensive analysis of the early integration of palliative care on caregiver well-being, patient's physical and psychosocial outcomes when living with liver and metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC), and health services utilization. This study thus broadens the scope to additional cancer types and degrees of progression.