Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major cause of disability, morbidity and mortality in old age. Patients with advanced stage COPD are most likely to be admitted three to four times per year with acute exacerbations of COPD (AECOPD) which are costly to manage. The adverse events of AECOPD are associated with poor quality of life, severe physical disability, loneliness, and depression and anxiety symptoms. Currently there is a lack of palliative care provision for patients with advanced stage COPD compared with cancer patients despite having poor prognosis, intolerable dyspnoea, lower levels of self efficacy, greater disability, poor quality of life and higher levels of anxiety and depression. These symptoms affect patients' quality of life and can be a source of concern for family and carers as most patients are likely to be housebound and may be in need of continuous support and care. Evidence of palliative care provision for cancer patients indicate that it improves quality of life and reduces health care costs. The reasons why COPD patients do not receive palliative care are complex. This partly may relate to prognostic accuracy of patients' survival which poses a challenge for healthcare professionals, including general practitioners for patients with advanced stage COPD, as they are less likely to engage in end-of-life care planning in contrast with terminal disease like cancer. Furthermore there is a lack of resources which constraints for the wider availability of the palliative care programmes in the health care system. Potential barriers may include unwillingness of patients to discuss advance care planning and end-of-life care with their general practitioners, lack of time, increased workload, and fear of uncertainty of the information to provide about the prognosis of the disease and also lack of appropriate tools to guide general practitioners when to refer patients for palliative care. COPD is a chronic incurable disease; those in an advanced stage of the disease pursuing intensive medical treatment may also benefit from the simultaneous holistic care approach of palliative care services, medical services and social services to improve quality of end of life care. Introduction Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide [1,2]. Studies in the US have reported death rate from COPD doubled in the past two decades while significant decline occurred in deaths rate from other chronic diseases, for example, chronic heart disease and stroke [3,4]. The trends of increasing annual death rate of COPD was also marked by the first time the number of women dying from COPD surpassed men [5] in contrast to demoPublished: 3 April 2007 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2007, 5:17 doi:10.1186/1477-7525-5-17 Received: 26 February 2007 Accepted: 3 April 2007 This article is available from: http://www.hqlo. com/content/5/1/17 © 2007 Yohannes; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.