Evidence for improving palliative care at the end of life: a systematic review.

Background: Many persons and their families are burdened by serious chronic illness in late life. How to best support quality of life is an important consideration for care.

Purpose: To assess evidence about interventions to improve palliative and end-of-life care.

A systematic review of measures of end-of-life care and its outcomes.

Objective: To identify psychometrically sound measures of outcomes in end-of-life care and to characterize their use in intervention studies.

Data Sources: English language articles from 1990 to November 2005 describing measures with published psychometric data and intervention studies of end-of-life care.

Study Design: Systematic review of end-of-life care literature.

Effect of content and format of prescription drug labels on readability, understanding, and medication use: a systematic review.

Objective: To evaluate the evidence regarding the optimal content and format of prescription labels that might improve readability, understanding, and medication use.

Data Sources: We performed a systematic review of randomized controlled trials, observational studies, and systematic reviews from MEDLINE and the Cochrane Database (1990-June 2005), supplemented by reference mining and reference lists from a technical expert panel.

Study Selection: We selected studies that focused on the content of physician-patient communication about medications and the content and format of prescription drug labels.

Quality measures for symptoms and advance care planning in cancer: a systematic review.

Purpose: Measuring quality of care for symptom management and ascertaining patient goals offers an important step toward improving palliative cancer management. This study was designed to identify systematically the quality measures and the evidence to support their use in pain, dyspnea, depression, and advance care planning (ACP), and to identify research gaps.

Methods: English-language documents were selected from MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health, PsycINFO (1995 to 2005); Internet-based searches; and contact with measure developers.

The state of women veterans' health research. Results of a systematic literature review.

Objective: Assess the state of women veterans' health research.

Design: Systematic review of studies that pertained specifically to or included explicit information about women veterans. A narrative synthesis of studies in 4 domains/topics was conducted: Stress of military life; Health and performance of military/VA women; Health services research/quality of care; and Psychiatric conditions.

Methodological approaches for a systematic review of end-of-life care.

As background for a National Institutes of Health State of the Science Conference on End-of-Life-Care, we performed a systematic review of end-of-life care and outcomes. The systematic review was intended to evaluate the evidence in the field from the perspective of concerns important to patients, caregivers, and the health care system. This article relates the challenges in performing a systematic review of end-of-life care and outcomes, and describes the methods that we used to define the scope, search the literature, develop exclusion and inclusion criteria, incorporate various types of articles, and synthesize the results.