Palliative Care Interventions Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Serious Illness: A Scoping Review

To map the range of multidisciplinary palliative care interventions that are available to adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with serious illness.

Scoping review methodology as outlined by Arksey and O'Malley.

Twenty-two articles describing nine specific AYA-focused, multidisciplinary palliative care interventions were included in this review. Interventions focused on supporting advance care planning (ACP), facilitating treatment decision making, managing pain, and promoting resilience, psychosocial well-being, and quality of life. Interventions were delivered face-to-face and via different eHealth platforms and were targeted to AYAs with cancer, HIV/AIDS, and cystic fibrosis in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

Few evidence-based multidisciplinary palliative care interventions have documented benefit for AYAs with serious illness. The limited work that has been done demonstrates that AYAs are open to engaging in palliative care interventions and suggests that individual members of the multidisciplinary team can implement these different interventions to support enhanced patient outcomes.