Moderator: HPCA
Home Based Palliative Care (HBPC) is preferable for multiple reasons, including:
- There is increasing demands of curable conditions on existing institutional care so beds in hospitals are in high demand.
- Worldwide studies have shown that home-based care (HBC) promotes healing in the comfort of the patient’s home, reinforces and supplements care from the patient’s family and friends.
- HBPC reduces unnecessary hospitalisations and expenditures on medications and interventions that are ineffective and may result in needless suffering.
- It is the most cost-effective way to provide palliative care. Research undertaken by the South African Medical Research Council shows that the public health sector would save approximately R2.5 billion per annum if only 50% of the patients who need Palliative Care were cared for at home. Applying the same modelling to the private healthcare sector, it is estimated that Home Based Palliative Care would save medical schemes an estimated R432 million per annum (Medical Research Council. June 2017).
All stakeholders therefore stand to benefit significantly from HBPC. Currently 94% of the care that HPCA’s 90 members across the country provide is home-based, making hospices the leading provider of HBPC nationally. In this workshop we will explore how we can work together to secure the continuum of care for palliative patients, as well as how the HBPC model could be adopted in public and private health care settings.