Overview of thematic categories (n=10)
| Theme | Total studies within theme (n=184) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Death and dying | 13 | Outputs focusing on issues relating to death and dying—including assisted dying—from a palliative care perspective |
| Education | 12 | Outputs focused on palliative care teaching, training, education and curricula |
| Ethics | 3 | Outputs examining ethical issues relevant to palliative care, such as decision-making, research practice and attitudes |
| Evaluation | 53 | Outputs conducted performing evaluations of palliative care interventions, including service models, models of clinical practice, pharmaceutical interventions, clinical tools, patient outcome measurement tools etc |
| Law | 1 | Outputs reporting legal issues and legislation in palliative care, either specific to palliative care or generic legislation that is relevant to aspects of palliative care |
| Methodological | 2 | Outputs reporting on issues relating to methodology in palliative care research, including methodological challenges and opportunities in palliative care research |
| Policy | 27 | Outputs reporting policy-level issues relevant to; standards, opioid availability, human rights, consensus building and international organisation guidance etc |
| Services and settings | 28 | Outputs reporting different palliative care services around the world in terms of models and foci of care (eg, home care/disease-specific care) as well as settings (eg, rural areas). Typically included outputs focused on the identification of services and did not conduct full evaluation |
| Stakeholders | 38 | Outputs reporting on issues specific to different stakeholders in palliative care, for example, physicians, nurses, patients, families etc. Commonly, included outputs focused on the ‘attitudes’ of these groups to specific issues |
| Symptom management | 7 | Outputs reporting on symptoms of palliative care patients (eg, cancer pain), symptom prevalence and management |