paywalled: What Can We Learn About the Spiritual Needs of Palliative Care Patients From the Research Literature?

What Can We Learn About the Spiritual Needs of Palliative Care Patients From the Research Literature?

Context 
Spirituality is a distinctive subject within palliative care practice and literature, but research to date is relatively undeveloped in this field and studies often throw more light on conceptual and methodological issues than producing reliable data for clinical practice.

Objectives 
To determine what is known about the spiritual needs of palliative care patients from the evidence presented in published research.

Methods 
Specialist online databases were interrogated for primary empirical studies of patients with a chronic disease unresponsive to curative treatment. Studies that only used a proxy for the patient or reported expert opinion were excluded. Each study was critically appraised for quality and the strength of its evidence to determine if any data could be pooled.

Results 
Thirty-five studies were identified, equating to a total of 1374 patients.