| Terms | Assumptions |
| Community specialised palliative care services (SPCS) | The provision of PEACH does not alter community SPCS resource use. |
| Emergency visit presentations | · If an ED presentation was recorded without a specific date then the visit was assumed to have occurred within the seven days prior to death. · ED presentations without complete coding data: assumed the lowest cost category based on the data that was provided. |
| Hospital, hospice and palliative care unit inpatient stays | · There are no ARDRG coding data for the inpatient stays for UC cases with a carer who died at home to enable costing of the inpatient days. Therefore applied the average national cost per day (2013-14 $1839). · PEACH cases without place of death data are assumed to experience an inpatient death with an average inpatient stay similar in length and cost to usual care cases that have a carer and an inpatient stay and death. |
| Usual care | It is assumed that the people who die are in the terminal/deteriorating phase and have an AKPS score ≤40 and therefore have similar functional status and illness severity to PEACH Program participants. According to the recent National Report on Patient Outcomes in Palliative Care in Australia,24 93.7% of inpatients in the terminal phase who were receiving services from palliative care providers died at the end of the phase. Further, the majority of these palliative care patients are assumed to prefer home-based care and a home death.1 |