Helena Ullgren, RN at the Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden, discusses her talk on the gold standard for effective care transitions from curative to early palliative care at the European Cancer Congress of the European Cancer Organisation (ECCO) 2017 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She describes her experience of how patients often assume that oncological and palliative care teams are in contact to coordinate the transition from curative to palliative care, however this is not always the case, with responsibility for communication between the teams often resting on the patient. Helena Ullgren concludes that early palliative care may not be beneficial if it is not integrated with oncological treatment, and suggests that early palliative care should be re-defined to include integration with oncological treatment, and that more research is needed to determine the details of this collaboration.
Integrating the transition from curative oncological treatment to early palliative care
