Background: Palliative care programs are becoming increasingly common in U.S. hospitals.
Objective: To quantify the growth of hospital based palliative care programs from 2000–2003
and identify hospital characteristics associated with the development of a palliative care program.
Design and measurements: Data were obtained from the 2001–2004 American Hospital Association
Annual Surveys which covered calendar years 2000–2003. We identified all programs
that self-reported the presence of a hospital-owned palliative care program and acute medical
and surgical beds. Multivariate logistic regression was used to identify characteristics significantly
associated with the presence of a palliative care program in the 2003 survey data.
Results: Overall, the number of programs increased linearly from 632 (15% of hospitals) in
2000 to 1027 (25% of hospitals) in 2003. Significant predictors associated with an increased
likelihood of having a palliative care program included greater numbers of hospital beds and
critical care beds, geographic region, and being an academic medical center. Compared to notfor-
profit hospitals, VA hospitals were significantly more likely to have a palliative care program
and city, county or state and for-profit hospitals were significantly less likely to have a
program. Hospitals operated by the Catholic Church, and hospitals that owned their own hospice
program were significantly more likely to have a palliative care program than non-
Catholic Church-operated hospitals and hospitals without hospice programs respectively.
Conclusions: Our data suggest that although growth in palliative care programs has occurred
throughout the nation's hospitals, larger hospitals, academic medical centers, not-for-profit
hospitals, and VA hospitals are significantly more likely to develop a program compared to
other hospitals.
