Does palliative care belong in the ER?

Hospital administrators tend to agree that it's a good idea to have emergency departments offer palliative care, according to a new study. But one of the biggest barriers to getting palliative care in the ER is the physicians. "There's a stigma that palliative care is the same as end of life care, the same as hospice," said Dr. Corita Grudzen, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School. Administrators felt that emergency physicians don't have the time to discuss how much intervention patients want. One said, "'emergency physicians have a limited ability to focus on anything other than the 300 patients they're going to see today.'"