Table 4.

Indicators of quality of care delivered across the different care settings in the region with fully developed palliative care (PC), comparing patients with cancer to patients without cancer.

	Specialized PC		Community settings		Hospitalsa
	NCancer = 1524 NNon-cancer = 187	p-value	NCancer = 554 NNon-cancer = 1934	p-value	NCancer = 410 NNon-cancer = 1084	p-value
Patients (%) lacking
Oral health assessment
Cancer	17.6		23.7		34.8
Non-cancer	14.9	0.36	26.1	0.25	32.8	0.46
End-of-life conversation
Cancer	5.7		22.0		42.7
Non-cancer	15.9	<0.01	51.5	<0.01	72.5	<0.01
Pain assessment
Cancer	22.3		55.7		75.9
Non-cancer	31.6	<0.01	65.9	<0.01	88.3	<0.01
Companionship at death
Cancer	12.4		10.7		20.2
Non-cancer	24.1	<0.01	13.1	0.11	26.3	<0.01
Patients (%) having
Artificial nutrition/fluid in the last 24 hb
Cancer	7.9		1.8		42.1
Non-cancer	10.5	0.23	1.5	0.61	41.5	0.81

Note that number of patients refer to the minimum number of patients for each setting and diagnosis. Due to missing data for the different indicators, the number of included patients for the specialized PC ranges up to N = 1731/191 for cancer and non-cancer, respectively. Correspondingly, for community settings, the number of patients ranges up to N = 609/2118 for cancer and non-cancer, respectively, and for hospitals the range is up to N = 531/1413 for cancer and non-cancer, respectively.

p-values result from chi-square tests.

^aExcluding specialized palliative care units.

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