Development of the palliative care referral system: proposal of a tool for the referral of cancer patients to specialized palliative care.

Background: Early palliative care (PC) has shown beneficial effects for advanced cancer patients. However, it is still debated what criteria to use to identify patients for PC referral.

Aim: To document the initial steps of the development of the Palliative Care Referral System (PCRS), a tool to be used by oncologists in clinical practice.

Outpatient palliative care referral system (PCRS) for patients with advanced cancer: an impact evaluation protocol.

Introduction: Early palliative care (PC) in the clinical pathway of advanced cancer patients improves symptom control, quality of life and has a positive impact on overall quality of care. At present, standardised criteria for appropriate referral for early PC in oncology care are lacking. The aim of this project is to develop a set of standardised referral criteria and procedures to implement appropriate early PC for advanced cancer patients (the palliative care referral system, PCRS) and test its impact on user perception of quality of care received, on patient quality of life and on the use of healthcare resources.

Clown therapy for procedural pain in children: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Unlabelled: Among the distraction techniques used for the non-pharmacological management of acute pediatric pain, one of the most performed is clown therapy. Despite the presence in the literature of some systematic reviews that evaluate its effectiveness, none of them examines its outcomes on procedural pain which has therefore been investigated in this study. The literature search for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was performed on the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Scopus over a time frame ranging from each database setup date to 31 July 2021.