Requesting Support for Inpatient Palliative Care in Public Hospitals: Topics and Tactics (PDF) covers approaches and topics that are commonly included in support requests. Although the processes and requirements vary across institutions, this document will orient you to what might be expected and give you ideas for what to cover in your own written or oral support requests. You can use the companion Support Request Template (zip) as a starting point for creating slides to accompany a verbal presentation.
Making the Case for Inpatient Palliative Care

About the SeriesThis guide is part of the series Resources to Support Palliative Care in Public Hospitals, which includes information and tools to help leaders of palliative care programs at public health care systems to sustain and expand inpatient and outpatient services that meet the needs of people with serious illnesses. |
Leaders of public hospital inpatient palliative care (IPPC) services often need to make the case to health system clinical and administrative leaders to secure resources needed to sustain, improve, or expand the palliative care service. The materials provided here review useful tactics and tools for making the case and keeping IPPC on the radar of leaders who make resource allocation decisions.
Preparing Request for Support
Useful Resources
You can incorporate the information, figures, and references in this section into your written or verbal support requests. Some materials can be shared with executives to educate them on palliative care principles, best practices, and outcomes.
- Resources Available from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (PDF) is a list of downloadable resources available from CAPC to help make the case for IPCC services.
- Meeting the Need: Understanding the Impact of Palliative Care in California’s Public Hospitals (zip) is a slide deck that details findings from a 2021 study of staffing patterns and outcomes among California IPPCs. The “notes” sections of each slide include talking points that were made in the original webinar presentation, which can be adapted for your use. In addition to findings from the study, the deck includes case vignettes and slides that summarize published literature demonstrating the value of palliative care. You can incorporate slides from this deck into your own written or verbal materials. Findings of the study are also described in a paper, Doing More with the Same: Comparing Public and Private Hospital Palliative Care Within California, which was published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine in January 2022.
- References for Making the Case for, and Evaluating Financial Impact of, Inpatient Palliative Care (PDF) is a list of selected peer-reviewed studies that describe the positive impacts of IPPC that you may wish to reference in your support request. The document includes notes on key findings from each publication, such as patient characteristics, IPPC service characteristics, and a range of outcomes.
- Additional Slides That Might be Useful (zip) features slides that define palliative care, data from a 2019 CHCF survey assessing California’s attitudes toward and knowledge of PC, and slides describing financial and utilization outcomes from published studies. It might be useful to incorporate these slides into your materials, depending on your audience, focus, and goals.
Being Ready: Activities to Have in Place Before Asking for Support
Activities to Have in Place Before Asking for Support (PDF) includes suggestions on what to do before asking for resources for your inpatient palliative care program, and after you get them.
Advice and Observations from Public Hospital Palliative Care Leaders
For more than a decade most of California’s public hospitals have operated IPPC services. Three of the public hospital PC leaders who have successfully secured resources to launch, sustain, expand, or improve these services have generously shared advice for others who will be doing similar work in the coming years.
Daniel Cox
Advice and Observations from Daniel Cox, MD, Director of Palliative Care Service, Ventura County Medical Center
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Carin van Zyl
Advice and Observations from Carin van Zyl, MD, FACEP, Service Chief, Adult and Pediatric Palliative Medicine LAC+USC Medical Center
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Katherine Yu
Advice and Observations from Katherine Yu, MD, Director of Palliative Care, Olive View-UCLA Medical Center; Clinical Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
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