An evidence-based training program to improve the capacity of emergency department care teams to communicate with seriously ill older patients about palliative care did not lead to lower rates of hospital admission, according to the results of the PRIM-ER trial.

The results were published online ahead of print in JAMA.

More than three-quarters of seriously ill older adults in the United States will visit an emergency department in their last 6 months of life. Palliative care specialists are not always available in emergency departments, and emergency clinicians may lack the training or tools to assist older adults who have serious, life-limiting illness in making complex medical decisions.

PRIM-ER, an NIH Collaboratory Trial, was a stepped-wedge, cluster randomized trial of a palliative care training program in 29 emergency departments in the United States. The program consisted of training in palliative care, simulation-based communication workshops, clinical decision support tools, and audit and feedback.

The study team, led by Corita Grudzen at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Keith Goldfeld at New York University, evaluated the initial emergency department visits of nearly 99,000 older adults with serious, life-limiting illness before and after implementation of the training program. The primary outcome was hospital admission from the emergency department. Secondary outcomes included subsequent healthcare use and survival.

There was no difference in the rate of hospital admission for seriously ill older adults after emergency department staff received the palliative care training intervention. The intervention also did not have an effect on subsequent health care use or short-term mortality.

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“Our complex, multicomponent intervention designed to embed palliative care skills in emergency medicine practice for patients with serious, life-limiting illness did not show an effect on hospital admission, subsequent health care use, or short-term mortality,” said Grudzen, an emergency medicine physician and palliative care specialist. “Despite this, the development, implementation, and testing of primary palliative care interventions remain a priority, given the workforce shortages in hospice and palliative medicine,” Grudzen said.

An important and unanticipated experience in the conduct of the PRIM-ER trial between 2018 and 2022 was the COVID-19 public health emergency. Strain placed on the healthcare system by the pandemic limited the ability of home care and hospice agencies to accept patients and narrowed the referral options available to emergency department clinicians. These impacts may have influenced the trial’s results.

PRIM-ER was supported within the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory by a grant award from the National Institute on Aging.

“The NIH Collaboratory is a critical resource for the conduct of pragmatic trials,” Grudzen said. “The faculty willingly share their expertise in all aspects of pragmatic trial design, conduct, and analysis. Their recommendations are the rare combination of cutting edge, practical, and battle tested. The program’s additional electronic and virtual resources are invaluable to growing the pragmatic trial community,” she said.

Learn more about PRIM-ER.