An Observational Study of the Prevalence of Patients Requiring Palliative Care in French Anti-cancer Centers. (PREPA-10)

Continuous improvement of therapeutics helped to lengthen different stages of natural cancer evolution. Advanced cancer patients are followed-up even longer; therefore there is a need to increase palliative care resources. A global therapeutic approach is being set up gradually thanks to specialized supportive care team. This global approach includes therapeutics and life condition improvement of the patient and his family.

In France, only 2 anti-cancer centers have a palliative care unit. The 16 other centers design hospital beds for palliative care and work with mobile palliative care teams.

According to latest studies with high level of evidence, International oncology societies published good practices guidelines supporting the need of early palliative cares for patients with metastatic cancer.

In 2010, Temel et al. demonstrated early palliative care effectiveness. Indeed, early palliative care led to significant improvements in both quality of life (score on the FACT-L scale: 98.0 vs. 91.5; p=0.03) and mood (depressive symptoms: 16% vs. 38%, P=0.01). Moreover median survival was longer among patients receiving early palliative care (11.6 months vs. 8.9 months, p=0.02). Analysis showed that patients assigned to early palliative care stopped chemotherapy earlier, had a higher enrollment rate in palliative care units and less depressive symptoms when cares were provided by both oncologists and palliative care teams.

Other specific scales support efficiency of early palliative care on quality of life. Early palliative care increases also satisfaction of the cares. Therefore, these results illustrate the need for an early integration of palliative care in France; and this approach is recommended in the third national plan against cancer.

Despite efficacy data, no high international consensus exists on a screening score for patients requiring early palliative care. Some teams therefore use prognostic factors like Barbot score.

Confronted with such difficulties, the French Society for Counselling and Palliative Care create a score (PALLIA-10) with 10 items on personal situation of the patient and his disease. This score helps medical staffs to direct patients to a specialized team as soon as it is > 3/10.

PALLI-10 score is not optimized because of the large number of patients with a score > 3 in the French anti-cancer centers. In 2014, a team from Centre Fraçois Baclesse (Caen, France) showed that nearly 65% of hospitalized patients in medicine department has a score PALLIA-10 > 3/10. Today, mobile palliative care teams are too small to manage so many patients.

First, it is important to evaluate the prevalence of these patients in France. Description of patients hospitalized in a Center for the Treatment of Cancers should help us to describe the characteristics of patients requiring cares provided by a mobile palliative care team.