The Home Care Support Team (ESAD) of Menorca increases the coverage of palliative care to 365 days a year, with the extension of face-to-face care in the evenings and weekends, and telephone care. This initiative increases the quality of care for patients included in the programme by improving continuity: improving the monitoring and adaptation of the care response they need.
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Until now, the ESAD’s opening hours were Monday to Friday, from 8.00 am to 3.00 pm. As of this October, face-to-face attention is from 8.00 am to 8.00 pm, so that coverage is extended from seven to twelve hours every day of the week, including public holidays.
This was explained by Estefania Serratusell, Deputy Director of Chronicity, today at a press conference, where she was accompanied by Txema Coll, Director of Primary Care for the Menorca Health Area, and Josep Borràs, Coordinator of Palliative Care.
To make the expansion effect, a new team has been added, bringing the total number of care teams to three, made up of a doctor and a nurse. Dr. Josep Borràs is currently the coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit, made up of doctors Núria Bombí and Jaume Borràs, and nurses Cecília Padrós, Ivanka Rojas and Sara Le More. The unit also includes the psychologist Magdalena Marqués.
Along with this reference team, other healthcare professionals from Primary Care and the Mateu Orfila Hospital will also take shifts to cover the service at weekends and on public holidays.
The Menorca palliative
The increased healthcare coverage is also reinforced with more hours of telephone assistance. Patients in the programme, their families and carers have the possibility of making telephone consultations to resolve questions related to their state of health, the discomfort of the disease or pharmacological treatment from 8.00 am to 8.00 pm, every day of the year.
The ESAD is a service of the Menorca Health Area located at the Mateu Orfila Hospital. For twenty-six years it has been providing specific palliative care at home to patients who need it – and their families and carers – and supports the primary care teams that refer each patient. The profile of the patient that the ESAD attends to is mainly those requiring palliative care (whether oncological or not), although they can also attend to cases of patients who are not strictly palliative, but who require a complex approach in the home setting.
In 2021, 156 patients were treated. The average age is 77 years. Sixty-six per cent are men and 34 per cent are women, and 75.6 per cent are cancer patients. The average number of days in the programme is 51. Of the 147 deaths recorded last year, 36 died at home and 111 in hospital.