Object: The Dutch PCC teams are mainly reached by phone. On request of the primary caregiver or on the proposal of a team members, the teams additionally have the possibility to visit the patient. The later is called a bedside consultation. The bedside consultations contain a further exploration of the patient’s care needs. The consultants never take over the responsibility of care. The aim of this study is to describe differences between telephone and bedside consultations and to give indications for the surplus value of the time-consuming bedside consultations.
Method: Since March 2001 the PCC teams register all consultations. The registration form includes information about the requesting professionals, patients, the initial questions and the problems identified during the exploration.
Results: The telephone consultations (n=1769) and bedside (n=1136) consultations, came from 16 PCC teams. The telephone consultations came mostly from physicians whereas the majority of the bedside consults originated from nurses. The prognosis of the patients is relatively better in bedside consultations. The average number of initial questions was 1.9 in the telephonic consultations and 2.4 in the bedside consultations. After a exploration respectively 3.7 and 6.9 relevant problems were addressed. In the bedside consultations more different aspects of palliative care were addressed especially with regard to social, spiritual and daily functioning problems and the support for the informal caregiver.
Conclusions: Compared to telephone consultations, bedside consultations result in a substantial higher amount of problems and a greater range of domains in palliative care, indicating a surplus value for bedside consultations.