ArticleBMC palliative care2021
Quality of dying in hospital general wards: a cross-sectional study about the end-of-life care.
Article in BMC palliative care, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Quality indicators for palliative care for older people: An umbrella review.Palliative medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Ready for the end? Fear of death and training in palliative care: a look at nursing and physiotherapy students in Bolivia.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- The Impacts of End-of-Life Care Stress, Perception of a Good Death, and Emotional Intelligence on End-of-Life Care Performance Among Public Hospital Nurses.Journal of nursing management · 2026Article
- Article
- Prevalence of Delayed Discharge Among Patients Admitted to the Internal Medicine Wards: A Cross-Sectional Study.Nursing reports (Pavia, Italy) · 2025Article
- Enhancing end-of-life care practices on the medicine units: perspectives from nurses and families.BMJ open quality · 2025Article
- Palliative care knowledge and self-efficacy: a comparative study between intensive care units and general units nurses.BMC palliative care · 2024Article
- Noninvasive monitoring technologies to identify discomfort and distressing symptoms in persons with limited communication at the end of life: a scoping review.BMC palliative care · 2024Article
- Registered Nurses' beliefs about end-of-life care: A mixed method study.Nursing open · 2023Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn the last decade, access to national palliative care programs have improved, however a large proportion of patients continued to die in hospital, particularly within internal medicine wards.
objectivesTo describe treatments, symptoms and clinical management of adult patients at the end of their life and explore whether these differ according to expectation of death.
methodsSingle-centre cross-sectional study performed in the medical and surgical wards of a large tertiary-level university teaching hospital in the north of Italy. Data on nursing interventions and diagnostic procedure in proximity of death were collected after interviewing the nurse and the physician responsible for the patient. Relationship between nursing treatments delivered and patients' characteristics, quality of dying and nurses' expectation about death was summarized by means of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA).
resultsFew treatments were found statistically associated with expectation of death in the 187 patients included. In the last 48 h, routine (70.6%) and biomarkers (41.7%) blood tests were performed, at higher extent on patients whose death was not expected. Many symptoms classified as severe were reported when death was highly expected, except for agitation and respiratory fatigue which were reported when death was moderately expected. A high Norton score and absence of anti-bedsore mattress were associated with unexpected death and poor quality of dying, as summarized by MCA. Quality of dying was perceived as good by nurses when death was moderately and highly expected. Physicians rated more frequently than nurses the quality of dying as good or very good, respectively 78.6 and 57.8%, denoting a fair agreement between the two professionals (k = 0.24, P < 0.001). The palliative care consultant was requested for only two patients.
conclusionStaff in medical and surgical wards still deal inadequately with the needs of dying people. Presence of hospital-based specialist palliative care could lead to improvements in the patients' quality of life.
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