Palliative care screening tools and patient outcomes: a systematic review

Palliative care (PC) refers to providing patients with physical, psychological, mental, and other care and humanistic care services in a multidisciplinary collaborative mode with end-of-stage patients and family members as the centre. The PC screening tool (PCST) was developed to identify individuals who may benefit from PC services and is widely assumed to improve patient outcomes.

The purpose is to understand which specific PCST has been applied to clinical patients and to analyse and summarise the impact of using these tools on patient outcomes.

A systematic review of articles published on PCST was performed in PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL and MEDLINE in January 2024. All original research articles on PCST fulfilling the following eligibility criteria were included (1) utilisation and evaluation of tools was the primary objective and (2) at least one patient outcome was reported.

A total of 22 studies were included, 12 studies used a prospective study, 4 studies used a non-RCT and 6 studies used an RCT. The studies were heterogeneous regarding study characteristics, especially patient outcomes. In total, 24 different patient outcomes were measured, of which 16 outcomes measured in 12 studies significantly improved.

We found that the majority of included studies reported that implementing PCST can improve patient outcomes to some extent, especially when used to improve in reducing hospitalisation time and patient readmission rate. However, there is a lack of high-quality research on this widely used screening tool.