What is the evidence for conducting palliative care family meetings? A systematic review - a podcast by SAGE Publications Ltd.

This episode features the work of Philippa Cahill et al (School of Medicine, The University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia) who describes a systematic review that examines the evidence supporting family meetings as a strategy to address the needs of palliative patients and their families.

The authors found that there was low-level evidence to support family meetings. Only two quantitative pre- and post-studies used a validated palliative care family outcome measure with both studies reporting significant results post-family meetings. Four other quantitative studies reported significant results using non-validated measures.

In conclusion the findings demonstrates that there is a paucity of evidence to support family meetings in the inpatient palliative care setting. Further research using more robust designs, validated outcome measures, and an economic analysis are required to build the family meeting evidence before they are routinely adopted into clinical practice. Full paper available from: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi10.1177/0269216316658833

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