Specialist palliative care services for adults with advanced, incurable illness in hospital, hospice, or community settings—protocol for a systematic review

Discussion The available evidence will be summarized and discussed to provide a basis for decision-making among health care professionals and policy makers. For SPC, we believe that multi-professional care is of utmost importance. Therefore, single-profession interventions such as physician consultations will not be included. Based on the multi-dimensional scope of palliative care, we chose QoL as the primary outcome, despite an expected heterogeneity among the QoL outcomes. We consider unidimensional endpoints such as “pain” for the physical domain to be inadequate for capturing the true scope of (S)PC (i.e., QoL) as defined by the World Health Organization. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42015020674
Source: Systematic Reviews - Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research