Transforming palliative care in Colombia through a comprehensive patient-centered strategy using an individualized holistic needs assessment tool

Background: Despite marked developments in palliative care in Colombia over this last decade, there remains fragmentation in relation to the integration of palliative care into chronic illness management, hampering the provision of optimal care (Reid et al, 2021). This project builds on our previous work which includes the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral for Care (SPARC) being translated and validated to a Colombian-Spanish version (SPARC-Sp).
Objectives: This project aimed to co-design a strategy to: (1) emphasise the importance of a holistic needs assessment to identify individual supportive and palliative care unmet needs; and (2) inform the implementation of a needs assessment tool (SPARC-Sp) across care settings within Colombia.
Design and methods: The UK based team (Queen’s University Belfast and University of Sheffield) and Colombian-based collaborators at Universidad del Cauca and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana delivered a series of seven co-design workshops in 2022/2023. Of these, three were online and four were in-person (both rural and urban areas). Attendees at all co-design workshops included key stakeholders such as patients, carers, healthcare professionals, volunteers, non-governmental organisations, finance administrative staff and policy makers.
Results: The workshops explored the current palliative care provision and co-designed an implementation strategy for SPARC-Sp within the Colombian palliative care pathway. Responsive to information shared at the workshops around patient / healthcare professional requirement for education in relation to both palliative care and SPARC-Sp, we co-designed a series of five videos. These will act as educational tools and will be incorporated into future research.
Conclusions: This project has co-designed an implementation strategy for SPARC-Sp, to identify patients with unmet supportive and palliative care needs who would benefit from timely, holistic needs assessment and associated care provision. This work will form the foundation for a future large-scale funded research project focusing on the implementation and evaluation of SPARC-Sp within Colombia.