Abstract
Background:
Palliative care seeks to support the physical, psycho-social and spiritual needs of patients and families who are facing life threatening diseases. Advantages of establishing a palliative care unit, or alternatively co-locating patients, include promoting optimal physical and psychological symptom management; increased family satisfaction; and facilitating resource allocation.
Objective:
To design a stand-alone hospital unit to provide end of life care during a pandemic.
Setting:
Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH), a 1,144 bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility and Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai.
Method:
Tracking key indicators signaling the need for conversion to a COVID-19 unit, and identifying factors to facilitate a successful conversion.
Result/Implementation:
Using previously identified key focused action categories as framework, we describe our successful palliative care unit (PCU) conversion into a COVID-19 care unit.
Conclusion:
We believe that these operational insights gained from transforming our unit during COVID-19 will be helpful to other programs and institutions during a pandemic, or public health emergencies.
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