When COVID-19 was spreading across Italy in February 2020, all eyes at David Grant U.S. Air Force Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base, California were fixated on the unfolding pandemic, realizing their hospital may potentially be one of the first to be impacted.

Air Force Lt. Col. Laurie Migliore, acting director, Clinical Investigation Facility and director of Biobehavioral Research, along with essential medical personnel were charged with reviewing Grant's Crisis Standards of Care, particularly the availability of palliative care for potential COVID-19 patients.

Migliore said it became evident from seeing the death rates in Italy that DGMC may be impacted with unprecedented numbers of critically ill and potentially dying patients. They had to be ready to provide both medical and palliative care.

"Our goal was to develop a point of care tool that was targeted, practical and easy to use by frontline medical providers," said Migliore, who is also a registered nurse. "As the pandemic began to spread throughout the country, the volume of information evolved from scarce to the point of overwhelming."

Migliore developed a toolkit to provide guidance and information to medical personnel in four areas:

• Basic understanding of palliative care and palliative care principles
• Communication strategies and resources (getting on the same page, scripts)
• Symptom management (alleviating pain, breathlessness, anxiety, etc.)
• Support for caregivers (dealing with blame, guilt, anger, grief, death/dying)

Palliative care is specialty medical care for individuals with serious illnesses and is often provided by specially-trained teams of doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, and therapists.

Air Force Reserve Col. Stephen Hernandez, who was activated and deployed to New York City in April 2020, supported FEMA-led operations in New York. During his deployment, he served as the deputy team lead at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. He became a wealth of knowledge for Migliore with direct exposure to COVID-19 patients and their palliative needs.

During Hernandez's six weeks at the medical center, palliative care for COVID-19 patients was almost non-existent. He stated if the frontline medical staff had access to something similar to the toolkit the Grant team is developing, they could have focused more on providing palliative care rather than only life-prolonging care.

"Palliative care is important during a pandemic to optimize patient and family quality of life and to mitigate suffering among people with a serious illness," said Hernandez, who served as the chief nurse for more than 60 other reservists providing care at Lincoln. "It also has the potential to maximize and conserve limited resources to focus on seriously ill patients who have a higher likelihood of recovery."

Based on the evolving pandemic and feedback from Hernandez, Migliore and the staff supporting the project began a PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome and Time) analysis, literature review and toolkit development.