Although the death rates from AIDS have fallen in recent years, AIDS is still a fatal illness and the global burden of this disease continues to grow expodentially. Expert and accessible palliative care services are not systematically available in many medical settings, particularly in impoverished communities. Existing services are often fragmented, making it difficult to maintain continuity of care, particularly for those populations who have difficulty accessing these systems, such as the homeless, uninsured, and substance abusers. It is an emerging challenge to provide palliative care and services to the medically underserved and hard-to-reach individuals with HIV/AIDS. An initiative by the HIV/AIDS Bureau in HRSA is supporting innovative programs designed to address the differences in provision of palliative care to the HIV/AIDS population that are not met within a 'standard' palliative care service model. This presentation will describe the features of these demonstration projects and discuss the ongoing multi-site evalution effort. The evaluation was designed to inform issues related to the efficacy, efficiency and replicability of these demonstration projects. The data elements being collected were chosen to maximize the comparability of information across projects while recognizing the limitations imposed by substantive differences among the projects with regard to clients served, models of care, nature of services provided, and clients' health status. The domains accessed are relevant to the goals of palliative care and include quality of care, quality of life, symptoms, psychological functioning, physical functioning, service utilization, medical status, treatment history and sociodemographics. See na
Learning Objectives: 1. Understand innovative approaches to deliverying palliative care to underserved and hard-to-reach populations, 2. Understand incorporating evaluation and monitoring into care-planning and program development, 3. Comprehend the challenges in patient-centered care in medically-underserved populations.
Keywords: Access and Services, Death
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