Abstract
Palliative care is a specialty of medicine that focuses on improving the quality of life of those living with a chronic or life-limiting disease as well as supporting their families. While many tools exist that can identify palliative care patients, few are specifically designed for the ICU setting. This project aimed to implement a palliative care screening tool for adult ICU patients not admitted following a planned cardiothoracic surgery or procedure. The outcomes of this project were to better identify palliative care patients in the ICU, increase the number of palliative care consultations, and decrease the number of days between ICU admission and palliative care consultation. Palliative care offers many benefits to patient care, and implementing an appropriate screening tool designed for the ICU can help patients achieve these goals.|This study implemented a Modified CAPC ICU Screening Tool to an adult ICU over a 10 week period. The study was successfully able to answer to all three outcomes that were proposed. Using the tool, a large number (52.12%) of ICU patients qualified for a consultation to palliative care. With the use of this tool, consultation to palliative care increased from 19.46% to 47.06% for appropriate patients and decreased the time from ICU admission to palliative care consultation by almost a full day (25 hours). This study was able to successfully demonstrate that the use of the Modified CAPC ICU Screening Tool helps in obtaining palliative care services for patients and families who would benefit.