About Whole Community Palliative Rounds

Whole Community Palliative Rounds (WCPR) is a strategy to enable rapid clinical problem-solving for symptom burden in high-risk individuals, purposeful and timely communication, shared decision-making, and collaborative care planning among members of an inter-professional care team.

The structured rounds use evidence-informed assessment tools (e.g., PPS, ESASr) to focus the discussion by the interdisciplinary palliative team (defined as the enhanced circle of care). Participants rapidly review the patient’s goals of care and unmanaged physical or psychosocial/spiritual symptoms. Then participants make recommendations about care interventions or care plan revisions to improve the quality of care and decrease suffering in alignment with the individual’s goals of care. Timely communication with the most responsible providers is built into each case review.

Module Objectives

This micro-learning module builds on the CHCA Palliative Care ECHO learning session (October 2021) by outlining what changes are needed to successfully implement WCPR in your organization or region. These five changes include the following:

1. Enhance the circle of care
2. Facilitate the WCPR
3. Get referrals to WCPR
4. Engage partners in WCPR
5. Implement actionable recommendations from the WCPR