Project Description
Palliative Care for Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma
The purpose of this research is to improve
healthcare received by people with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most
common primary liver tumor, through the provision of palliative care. The
benefits of palliative care for cancer patients and their families are well
documented, and include improved quality of life and symptom control, reduced time
spent in the hospital, and in multiple studies, longer survival. However, cancer represents a diverse group
of illnesses and little is known about palliative care needs in the setting of
HCC, which is different from other cancers because it usually arises in the
setting of underlying liver disease. Rates of liver cancer in the United States
are rising and people with liver cancer face untreated symptoms and uncertainty
about their disease and prognosis. More information about how to best support them
is desperately needed. This project will help to address this problem through (1)
a secondary data analysis to describe patient characteristics associated with palliative
care receipt, and its impact on how much time people with HCC are able to spend
outside of the hospital; and (2) a qualitative study of physicians who treat HCC
to understand physician-level factors that determine when palliative care
referrals are made. This work will help provide the building blocks to create
future interventions that aim to improve quality of life for people living with
liver cancer and their families.
Bio
Christopher Woodrell, MD is Assistant Professor in the
Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City; he
is also Staff Physician in the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical
Center at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. He is an
early career health services investigator whose goal is to improve palliative
care delivery to people facing primary liver cancer and end-stage liver
disease. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College in Biochemistry
and his M.D. from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. After his internal
medicine training at The Mount Sinai Hospital, he completed both clinical and
research fellowships in palliative care at Icahn School of Medicine. He is
board certified in Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Internal Medicine. He
was selected as a Butler-Williams Scholar by the National Institute on Aging in
2016. During this Career Development Award he will seek to understand the
effect of palliative care on healthcare use by liver cancer patients at Mount
Sinai. He will also undertake a qualitative
study of knowledge and attitudes of specialist physicians who treat liver
cancer, to determine physician-level factors that affect palliative care
delivery to people with liver cancer. Dr. Woodrell hails from California,
and prior to medical school had a career as a ballet and modern dancer.
Email: Christopher.Woodrell@mssm.edu