There’s a great article over on NursingLink today about Joan Panke, a nurse practitioner that is the coordinator at George Washington University Hospital. It describes specific examples of how patients are benefiting from palliative care services at GW.

There was one part of the article that perplexed me, though:

Not all health economists or policymakers are yet persuaded that those savings are substantial or that they occur in all cases. (Savings, some note, may prove elusive in certain settings, such as cancer clinics.) But Diane Meier, head of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, which is also based at Mount Sinai, said the field’s explosive growth shows that hospital administrators see bottom-line benefits.

I guess it’s realistic for hospital administrators to discuss the economic benefits of palliative care, but this statement makes me think they are missing the point entirely. First of all, once you start talking about how getting patients out of the ICU and into palliative saves money, you are going to attract some critics who would say that money is the focus rather than quality of life. Secondly, even if providing patients with palliative care (as opposed to the “do everything” approach in the ICU) were more expensive (and clearly it’s not), wouldn’t it be worth it to do anyway, if that is what the patient wanted?

(A New Focus on Easing the Pain originally appeared in The Washington Post.)