Early specialist palliative care on quality of life for malignant pleural mesothelioma: a randomised controlled trial.

Purpose: Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) has a high symptom burden and poor survival. Evidence from other cancer types suggests some benefit in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) with early specialist palliative care (SPC) integrated with oncological services, but the certainty of evidence is low.

Methods: We performed a multicentre, randomised, parallel group controlled trial comparing early referral to SPC versus standard care across 19 hospital sites in the UK and one large site in Western Australia.