Hospitalizations of cancer patients in the last month of life: quality indicator scores reveal large variation between four European countries in a mortality follow-back study

Table 2 Quality indicator scores per country and comparing cancer patients who received palliative care from their GP and those who did not

	“Percentage of time spent in hospital” in the last month of life (%)				“Proportion with more than one hospitalization in the last 30 days of life” (%)
Performance Standard*^,†	<10%				<4%
	Belgium	The Netherlands	Italy	Spain	Belgium	The Netherlands	Italy	Spain
Total population per country ^‡	24.6	14.1	22.2	17.7	5.4	0.6	3.1	4.0
Did not receive palliative care from the GP ^§	39.7^\|\|	34.7^\|\|	29.3^\|\|	32.3^\|\|	8.3	1.3	5.1^¶	8.1
Received palliative care from the GP ^§	16.1^\|\|	7.5^\|\|	18.7^\|\|	11.8^\|\|	4.2	0.4	2.1^¶	3.3

*Performance standard for the quality indicator “the percentage of time spent in hospital” in the last month of life is 10% [9].
^†Performance standard for the for the quality indicator “the percentage of patients who had more than 1 hospitalization in the last month of life” is 4% [1, 10, 11].
^‡These percentages are standardized for gender, age and cancer type.
^§These percentages are not standardized for gender, age and cancer type, since these characteristics did not differ significantly between the two groups in each country.
^||Mann Whitney U test showed significant difference, p < 0.001.
^¶Fisher’s Exact test showed significant difference, p < 0.05.

ISSN: 1472-684X