You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Systematic review
Palliative care screening tools and patient outcomes: a systematic review
  1. Meiying Zhang1,
  2. Yuxia Zhao1 and
  3. Mengyun Peng2
  1. 1 Cancer Hospital Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
  2. 2 Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China
  1. Correspondence to Dr Mengyun Peng; nine_779134944{at}yahoo.co.jp

Abstract

Background Palliative care (PC) refers to providing patients with physical, psychological, mental, and other care and humanistic care services in a multidisciplinary collaborative mode with end-of-stage patients and family members as the centre. The PC screening tool (PCST) was developed to identify individuals who may benefit from PC services and is widely assumed to improve patient outcomes.

Objectives The purpose is to understand which specific PCST has been applied to clinical patients and to analyse and summarise the impact of using these tools on patient outcomes.

Methods A systematic review of articles published on PCST was performed in PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL and MEDLINE in January 2024. All original research articles on PCST fulfilling the following eligibility criteria were included (1) utilisation and evaluation of tools was the primary objective and (2) at least one patient outcome was reported.

Results A total of 22 studies were included, 12 studies used a prospective study, 4 studies used a non-RCT and 6 studies used an RCT. The studies were heterogeneous regarding study characteristics, especially patient outcomes. In total, 24 different patient outcomes were measured, of which 16 outcomes measured in 12 studies significantly improved.

Conclusions We found that the majority of included studies reported that implementing PCST can improve patient outcomes to some extent, especially when used to improve in reducing hospitalisation time and patient readmission rate. However, there is a lack of high-quality research on this widely used screening tool.

  • Palliative Care
  • Cancer
  • Hospice care
  • Terminal care

Data availability statement

All data relevant to the study are included in the article.

https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2024-005093

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Data availability statement

    All data relevant to the study are included in the article.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors MZ: methodology, supervision, resources; review and editing. YZ: data curation, writing–review and editing. MP: methodology, data curation; formal analysis; investigation; methodology; resources; visualisation; writing–original draft; writing–review and editing. MP is the guarantor.

    • Funding This study was supported by Jiangsu higher education natural science research surface project.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.