Dying in hospital - Optimization of care in the dying phase

German Version

Project management: Prof. Dr. R. Voltz, Dr. Kerstin Kremeike
Contact: Dr. Kerstin Kremeike
Duration: 08/2020 - 08/2023
Funding: Innovation fund, Federal Joint Committee (G-BA)

Project Description

Hospitals are the most frequent place of death in Germany (47%), but at the same time, the least preferred one – for both patients and their relatives. Important indicators and outcome variables indexing quality of the dying phase and care for the dying are already consented. Moreover, there are already various proposals to achieve these quality objectives. However, they are still not sufficiently adapted to the heterogeneous needs and structures of individual hospital wards. Therefore, the planned three-phase project aims at the implementation and evaluation of situation-specific measures in everyday clinical practice.

Existing experience regarding optimum care of dying will be identified within the framework of an expert symposium and recorded within a portfolio of measures. Based on this, ten teams of different wards from two university hospitals select suitable measures and apply them in their daily clinical practice. The dying situation on the respective wards is recorded both at a baseline survey before application of the selected measures and afterwards in a follow-up survey. Retrospective file analysis of deceased persons, quantitative employee surveys, multi-professional focus groups and interviews with relatives form the data basis for his. Results are also to be checked for their transferability to other hospitals.