ReviewEcancermedicalscience2025
Quality indicators and patient outcome measures for palliative care in cancer patients: a systematic review.
Review in Ecancermedicalscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Emergency department-initiated palliative care screening among older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol.BMJ open · 2025Article
- From Evidence to Implementation: Bridging the Last Mile in Palliative Care.Indian journal of palliative careArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
18 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: With the exponential rise in global cancer incidence, the surge in demand for palliative care has outstripped capacity, limiting patients' access to quality and holistic palliative care, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Despite an upturn in research activity, evidence in palliative care remains limited, given its complexity as well as the shortage of standardised quality indicators (QIs) and patient outcome measures (POMs). The objective of this systematic review is to assess the QIs and POMs used to evaluate palliative care service on aggregated and individual levels. Methods: We undertook a systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis guidelines to determine the QIs and/or POMs of palliative care in patients with non-communicable diseases. A Web of Science, EMBASE, PubMed and SOCSCI search between 1 January 2013 and 31 Dec 2022 identified 41 articles. We appraised the quality of all studies using the mixed methods appraisal tool. Results: 26.8% of studies focus on QIs, while 73.2% used POMs. >90% of palliative care research took place in high-income settings. Across domains of palliative care, the outcome of care is most studied, while the structure and process of palliative care are understudied. QIs and POMs identified often had overlapping themes. Due to the multidimensionality and intricacy of palliative care, evidence is limited, patchy and heterogenous in quality. Discussion: There is an overall lack of standardisation of QIs and POMs, as well as variability in evidence of palliative care research. We recommend that stakeholders collaborate to develop a standardised repository of metrics for monitoring and evaluating palliative care services at both individual and system levels, with a particular focus on structural and process indicators. Incorporating validated, patient-centred measures and selecting key items as quality indicators will enable meaningful tracking of changes, guiding resource allocation and driving improvements in patient-centred care. Furthermore, exploring alternative research designs is essential to enhance feasibility, uphold ethical integrity and strengthen the robustness of future studies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.