Home palliative medicine: an audit of weekend and public holiday telephones on-call

Objectives: To report the on-call activity of a well-established home care programme. Methods: The charts of consecutive phone calls recorded in the weekend or public holidays were reviewed. Results The principal reason to call were based on caregivers' uncertainty, for the need of information or just to be reassured. The other more frequent reason to call was related to technical problems with peripheral intravenous central catheters. Conclusions: An integrated system of 'on call' allows to select the interventions, covering most of the patients' needs.