Background Paediatric palliative care nursing is an emerging need that focuses on achieving the best possible quality of life for children in the terminal phase. To achieve this goal, we need evidence based implementations.

Aim To systematically review the evidence for palliative care nursing among children.

Methods In order to conduct this systematic review; single author screened MEDLINE/Pubmed database from January/2005 till January/2015 with child/children, palliative care/end-of-life care and nurse/nursing keywords. Two authors reviewed 641 articles in detail and they worked together to extract data and evaluated the selected articles to resolve the uncertainties. Inclusion criteria were 1)sample with the age of childhood defined by WHO, 2)studies that focused on palliative care 3)primer research reports, 4)written in English. The selected articles were analysed according to year of publication, type of study/design, data’s collected, the age of target population, the illness or the condition of the sample, professionals involved, intervention/types of care/approach, outcome measure/main findings/results.

Results Of the 641 articles found, 563 were discarded because they didn’t present palliative child care as the main subject (n = 132), didn’t meet the other inclusion criteria (n = 83), were repeated (n = 318), weren’t in English (n = 16) or the article wasn’t available in full (n = 13). The included 79 studies were analysed in 4 subcategories: studies dealing with i)nursing care ii)nursing education, iii)nurses’ experiences, and iv)the parents’ experiences.

Discussion Many studies had a descriptive/explorative design and the evidence surrounding the palliative nursing care is quantitatively poor and more evidence is needed.

Conclusion Researches that evaluates the several nursing care on palliative care is needed.