Kim Martz attended the California State University Institute for Palliative Care’s 2018 National Symposium for Academic Palliative Care Education and Research held Oct. 11-12 in San Diego. There, she was one of five researchers awarded a $10,000 seed grant from the Gary and Mary West Foundation for her proposal, “Examining the Impact of Palliative Care Referrals on Concordance of Care for Discharged ICU Patients.”
Martz’s proposal is designed to study the relationship between the palliative care that critical care patients receive following their discharge from the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) compared to the care that was requested. Palliative care is specialty care aimed at alleviating suffering through symptom management, holistic support, and attention to the goals of care. Martz chose this area of study as critical care patients often face serious illnesses that can impose physical and emotional suffering.
The goal of this study is to provide health systems the opportunity to examine the types of conversations palliative care providers need to have in order to be most useful to patients in the ICU as well as throughout the hospital. The proposal studies the need for patient- and family-centered methods which are rarely used in studies of serious illness conversations after ICU discharge. The team for this study also includes Jenny Alderden, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing, and Rick Bassett, a critical care clinical nurse specialist at St Luke’s Health System.
A second purpose of this study is to understand if doctors or nurse practitioners in the ICU feel this conversation guide might be useful to them in helping meet the care goals of their patients, as well as to describe their perceptions of the patient conversation guides.
To read more about the seed grant, visit: https://csupalliativecare.org/seed-grant-winners-2018/