Table 3.

Indicators of quality of care delivered in the region with fully developed palliative care (PC) in different care settings: specialized palliative care, community-based settings and hospitals.

	Specialized PC	Community settings	Hospitalsa	p-value
	N = 1712	N = 2488	N = 1509
Patients (%) lacking
Oral health assessment	17.3	25.5	33.4	<0.01
End-of-life conversation	6.9	44.9	64.5	<0.01
Pain assessment	23.3	63.6	84.9	<0.01
Companionship at death	13.7	12.5	24.6	<0.01
Patients (%) having
Artificial nutrition/fluid in the last 24 hb	8.2	1.6	41.6	<0.01

Note that number of patients refer to the minimum number of patients for each setting. Due to varied and missing data for the different indicators, the number of included patients for the specialized PC ranges up to N = 1731, for the community settings to N = 2727 and for the hospitals up to 1944. When comparing only specialized PC and community-based settings, all results remained statistically significantly different (p > 0.01), except for companionship at death (p = 0.26).

p-values result from chi-square tests.

^aExcluding specialized palliative care units.

^bArtificial nutrition/fluid is usually not available in community-based settings.