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What are the outcomes of hospice care for cancer patients? A systematic review

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Abstract

Purpose

Over the past 2 decades, cancer has been the leading cause of death worldwide. Accordingly, cancer patients are the largest group of patients admitted to a hospice, accounting for 40% of overall hospice admissions every year. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to investigate the outcomes of caring for cancer patients at hospices.

Methods

PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched for English language articles published during the period from January 2008 to January 2022. The keywords used to search in this systematic review were included hospice, cancer, and neoplasm (for PubMed search only), which were searched in the titles and abstracts of the articles.

Results

Out of 803 articles found in the initial search, 38 were selected based on inclusion criteria. The studies indicated that hospice care resulted in outcomes such as reduced referral and admission to the emergency department (only one study reporting opposite results), reduced length and number of hospital admissions, reduced use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, increased pain reports, improved pain management, enhanced end-of-life quality, significantly reduced cost of treatment, reduced number of invasive interventions, death at home, increased survival and satisfaction of patients, and poor nutritional support.

Conclusion

Given the numerous and significant benefits of care in a hospice for cancer patients, health managers are recommended to consider developing hospices and introducing patients to these centers. Besides, they need to compensate for some shortcomings by, for example, providing better nutritional support and developing a care plan based on the type of cancers that the patients are suffering in hospices so that more specialized services can be delivered.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Dr. Hanie Dahmardeh, upon reasonable request.

Code availability

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nursing and Midwifery School, Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Birjand, Iran

    Simin Sharafi

  2. Student Research Committee, Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Birjand, Iran

    Atefeh Ziaee

  3. Nursing and Midwifery School, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Zahedan, Iran

    Hanie Dahmardeh

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  1. Simin Sharafi
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  2. Atefeh Ziaee
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  3. Hanie Dahmardeh
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Contributions

All listed authors significantly contributed to this project. Study protocol was developed by AZ, HD, and SS. AZ and SS carried out study selection and data extraction. AZ and SS provided the content expertise for study design and participated in writing the discussion section of the manuscript. HD is the reference librarian who conducted the literature search. SS provided the methodological expertise and supervised the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hanie Dahmardeh.

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Sharafi, S., Ziaee, A. & Dahmardeh, H. What are the outcomes of hospice care for cancer patients? A systematic review. Support Care Cancer 31, 64 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-022-07524-2

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