Palliative care is essential in the end of life setting to provide symptomatic relief to the dying patient. Therapeutic review should be employed to avoid excess medications. Our aim was to ascertain prescription patterns in the day of admission and day of the patients? death.

We performed a retrospective analysis of patients admitted to the Pneumology Ward of a tertiary centre and identified those who died in 2022. Sociodemographic and prescription data were collected. A subgroup analysis of cancer and non-cancer patients was performed.

From a total of 671 patients, 81 (49 cancer and 32 non-cancer) patients died (12.07%). Results are presented in figure 1. A written decision to simplify therapy was identified in 56.3% of cancer patients and 55.1% of non-cancer patients. Differences between admission and death were found in the number of pro re nata prescriptions of cancer patients, and in the number of fixed prescriptions of non-cancer patients. In the non-cancer patients, there was a significant decrease in the prescription of antibiotics, corticoids, proton-pump inhibitors, and anticoagulation. In both patient groups there was an increase in the use of palliative perfusion.

The decision to simplify prescription is taken in the majority of dying patients. There was a significant decrease of therapeutic prescriptions and a significant increase of palliative measures in both groups.