ArticleBMJ supportive & palliative care2024
Symptom assessment in the dying: family members versus healthcare professionals.
Article in BMJ supportive & palliative care, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Muslim communities' perspectives and preferences regarding end-of-life symptom management: a systematic review and narrative synthesis.BMJ open · 2026Pooled it
- Defining and measuring unmet palliative care needs among people with life-limiting illness: A scoping review of international evidence.Palliative medicine · 2026Article
- Discordance in Ratings of Symptoms Experienced by Nursing Home Residents With Cognitive Impairment.Journal of pain and symptom management · 2026Article
- Caregiver perception of quality of dying of cancer patients is associated with patient-reported quality of life during the last month of life.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesSymptom management and support of the family members (FMs) are considered essential aspects of palliative care. During end of life, patients are often not able to self-report symptoms. There is little knowledge in the literature of how healthcare professionals (HCPs) assess symptoms compared with FMs. The objective was to compare the assessment of symptoms and symptom relief during the final week of life between what was reported by FMs and what was reported by HCPs.
methodsData from the Swedish Register of Palliative Care from 2021 and 2022 were used to compare congruity of the assessments by the FMs and by HCPs regarding occurrence and relief of three symptoms (pain, anxiety and confusion), using Cohen's kappa.
resultsA total of 1131 patients were included. The agreement between FMs and HCPs was poor for occurrence of pain and confusion (kappa 0.25 and 0.16), but fair for occurrence of anxiety (kappa 0.30). When agreeing on a symptom being present, agreement on relief of that symptom was poor (kappa 0.04 for pain, 0.10 for anxiety and 0.01 for confusion). The trend was that HCPs more often rated occurrence of pain and anxiety, less often occurrence of confusion and more often complete symptom relief compared with the FMs.
conclusionsThe views of FMs and HCPs of the patients' symptoms differ in the end-of-life context, but both report important information and their symptom assessments should be considered both together and individually. More communication between HCPs and FMs could probably bridge some of these differences.
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