Poor correlation between physician and patient assessment of quality of life in palliative care
Eduardo Bruera
Correspondence Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine—Unit 8, The University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston, TX 77030, USA
Email ebruera@mdanderson.org
This article has no abstract so we have provided the first paragraph of the full text.
Petersen et al. observed a poor level of agreement between patient and physician assessments of patients' HRQOL on first contact, with no significant improvement during follow-up encounters. My research group made a similar observation in 49 patients admitted to an acute palliative care unit,1 with a tendency for physicians to underrate most symptoms, particularly sedation, shortness of breath, and pain. Other authors have observed both underrating and overrating by health-care professionals.2 These findings emphasize the need for routine patient-based symptom assessment in the clinical setting. Unfortunately, except for pain evaluation, such assessments are infrequent in clinical practice, even within palliative care centers. Even for pain evaluations, the accuracy of these assessments when conducted within regular clinical care has been questioned.3
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