Palliative Care in Breast Cancer During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has harmed the provision of palliative care (PC) services for women with breast cancer due to all the restrictions that came along with the virus.

To map the available evidence on the situation of PC in breast cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A scoping review was carried out based on the methodology proposed by the Joanna Briggs Institute. The search was conducted in nine databases, one electronic repository, and one library, using controlled vocabularies.

Twenty-nine articles and seven documents were included. The majority (11.4% each) were published in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States, 38.9% addressed palliative radiotherapy (RT), and 47.2% consisted of recommendations. From the content analysis, five categories were obtained focused on the recommendations on changes in palliative treatment guidelines and the response of PC teams to the evolving crisis.

The evidence pointed to the management of general PC, palliative RT, palliative chemotherapy, management of metastatic breast cancer, and use of technologies in palliative care. No recommendations were found to manage frequent symptoms in PC, indicating the need to develop primary studies that investigate these aspects in detail in this vulnerable group.

The results contained in this document can provide professionals working in this field of care with a global view of how other teams have dealt with the pandemic, thereby identifying the best guidelines to apply in their reality, taking into account the clinical and social situation of each patient.