Pandemic Impacting Palliative Care for Cancer Patients

POSTED ON MONDAY, June 1, 2020 

According to an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Oncology, the coronavirus is affecting the care provided to patients with other medical conditions especially those with cancer.

“We were finding that a lot of the patients who were getting their cancer treatments in our clinic were really struggling to figure out whether they should come in and continue getting treatments,” Ambereen Mehta, M.D., palliative care physician at University of California, Los Angeles and co-author of the editorial told Hospice News. “They’re immunosuppressed if they get their chemotherapy. We need to weigh the safety concerns of doing that against how much treatments they can afford to miss based on their disease. Those kinds of questions are really what we were facing early on.”

“In the beginning of the pandemic, we were asking ourselves a lot of questions. First, there was how we do no harm to our patients in our community. One of the things that we realized is that we do a lot of prescribing or medications for symptom management. For the way COVID develops and presents itself, there is actually a greater need for aggressive complex symptom management, and that is something that we’re specialists in,” Mehta said. “We figured out ways in which to really get ahead of that as a consulting team working with the primary team, and one of the ways that we’ve kind of changed how we how we do that is by taking on that a little bit more of a primary role and, and kind of taking on the responsibilities for ourselves.”

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