Patients with COPD are still missing out on specialist palliative care services in Australia, prompting calls for national guidelines to help improve access and public awareness.
Senior respiratory physician, Dr Natasha Smallwood, of the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Department of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine, said there needed to be a major shift in community understanding of palliative care, national guidelines, and more funding for specialist palliative care services in cities, regional and rural settings.
She told the limbic that there was widespread misconception that palliative care was reserved for end of life, and primarily patients with cancer.
“The community perception of cancer is death, whereas the community perception of COPD is, oh no, I smoked too much and I’m going to get breathless and might need inhalers,” she said.
“Clinics are not set up to have the time to spend with COPD patients to raise this, there are just so many barriers, and if often just happens too late. It’s (COPD) not a serious disease in the eyes of the community.”
Dr Smallwood said a recent article in the BMC Palliative Care journal had revealed less than one fifth of patients with COPD accessed specialist palliative care.
The Western Australian retrospective cohort study looked at the last year of life of persons with an underlying cause of death in 2009–10 from cancer, heart failure, renal failure, liver failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Alzheimer’s disease, motor neurone disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and/or HIV/AIDS.
The study found that of the 1094 patients who died from COPD, only 17.9% had access specialist palliative care.
Dr Smallwood said that while this represented an improvement on access rates from 10 years ago, there was still a long way to go.