Early in my research career, I was fascinated by the (then) frontier area of palliative care in the emergency department.  I asked emergency medicine clinicians what they thought when a patient who is seriously ill and DNR comes to the ED, and some responded, (paraphrasing), what are they doing here? This is not why I went into emergency medicine. I went into emergency medicine to act. I can’t do the primary thing I’ve been trained to do: ABC, ABC, ABCs.  Most emergency providers wanted to do the right thing for seriously ill patients, but they didn’t have the knowledge, skills, or experience to do it.

Today we focus on an intervention, published in JAMA, that gave emergency clinicians basic palliative care knowledge, training, and skills.  We talk with Corita Grudzen and Fernanda Bellolio about their cluster stepped wedge randomized trial of a palliative care intervention directed at emergency clinicians.  They got training in Vital Talk and ELNEC.  They got a decision support tool that identified hospice patients or those who might benefit from a goals of care discussion.  They got feedback.

So did it matter?  Hmmm….it depends.  We are fortunate to have Tammie Quest, emergency and palliative trained and long a leader in this space, to help us unpack and contextualize these findings. Today we discuss:

• Why the study was negative for the primary (hospitalization) and all secondary outcome (e.g. hospice use).

• Why to emergency clinicians, this study was a wild success because they had the skills they wanted/needed to feel like they could do the right thing (during the onset of Covid no less).

• Why this study was a success due to the sheer size (nearly 100,000 patients in about 30 EDs) of the study, and the fact that, as far as the investigators know, all study sites continue to employ the clinical decision support tool.

• What is a cluster stepped wedge randomized trial? 

• Were they surprised by the negative findings?

• How do we situate this study in the context of other negative primary palliative care interventions, outside the ED?  E.g. Yael Shenker’s negative study of primary palliative care for cancer, Randy Curtis’s negative study of a Vital Talk-ish intervention, Lieve Van den Block’s negative study of primary PC in nursing homes. Why do so many (most, all??) primary palliative care interventions seem to fail, whereas specialized palliative care interventions have a relatively robust track record of success. Should we give up on primary palliative care?  What’s next for primary palliative care interventions in the ED?

And if your Basic Life Support training certification is due, you can practice the correct chest compression rate of 110 beats per minute to Another One Bites the Dust.

-Alex Smith