Sage Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care

This episode features Dr Markus Krause (Institute of General Practice and Family Medicine, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany) and Antje Freytag (Institute of General Practice and Family Medicine, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany). Palliative homecare is an important component of palliative care, and it has a positive impact on the quality of care at the end-of-life. The effect of different types of palliative homecare on quality of care is sparsely researched. Within palliative homecare, cancer patients still outweigh non-cancer patients. We compared two types of palliative homecare in Germany: primary palliative care and specialized palliative homecare. Both reduced potentially aggressive interventions at the end-of-life. The more comprehensive specialized palliative homecare was associated with less potentially aggressive interventions in terms of lower rates of hospital as the place of death, hospital care, intensive care treatment, chemotherapy, and application of a percutaneous endoscopic