Within the spheres of research and practice, there are many different criteria used for defining palliative care patients. It doesn’t help that the definition of palliative care itself has evolved over the years, and the kinds of people receiving palliative care has also expanded.
The researchers were interested in defining the minimum characteristics that define a palliative care patient, in order to help compare results across different studies and implement research findings into practice.
The researchers carried out a systematic review of randomised controlled trials in palliative care, with the aim of using details of how each study defined palliative care patients to try and find a consensus. However, they found that many of these trials did not, in fact, use clear definitions or descriptions of palliative or terminal care patients.
They concluded that they were unable to formulate an operational definition of a palliative or terminal care patient, or to discriminate between them. However, they propose that a definition of a palliative or terminal care patient should include elements of the patients’ health status (ie type of disease and disease trajectory) and the types of care delivered to them (holistic, multidisciplinary, focused on pain and symptom control and quality of life).
The authors also suggest considering patients’ readiness to accept palliative care and a vision of palliative care shared by the patient and caregivers involved to be potentially important elements in the definitions of a palliative care patient and a terminal care patient.
‘Defining the palliative care patient: A systematic review’ by Wouter Van Mechelen at al was published in volume 27, issue 3, of Palliative Medicine.
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