Letters
Things have improved
EDITOR, - Mina Mills and colleagues paint a grim picture of the quality of care of dying patients in Scottish teaching hospitals in 1983.1 They conclude by exhorting the medical profession to "implement practical steps to facilitate high quality care of the dying" and to transmit the knowledge and skills of the hospice movement into all settings. While we agree that these findings are still relevant to current clinical practice, we believe that the situation has improved in the 10 years since the study was conducted.
The engine for change within hospitals has been the spread of the hospital support team. The first hospital support team was started at St Thomas's Hospital in 1978.2 The Directory of Hospice and Palliative Care Services for this year reports that nearly 240 hospitals have support teams or support nurses.3 The purpose of the support team is to provide the skill learnt from the
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Article
- Care of dying patients in hospital
- M Mills, H T O Davies, and W A Macrae
BMJ 1994 309: 583-586.[Abstract] [Full Text]
This Article
- Full text
- Respond to this article
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when responses are posted
- Alert me when a correction is posted
Services
- Email this article to a friend
- Find similar articles in BMJ
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Related Content
-
Hospice
-
Quality improvement
- Undergraduate
- Relevant Article
- Find this article in its weekly table of contents
Bookmark with
What's new
Latest blogs
Find BMJ on:
Services
Tools
Online poll
Resources
Rapid responses for this article
There are no rapid responses for this article. Print issues
