What are the outcomes of hospice care for cancer patients? A systematic review

Purpose Over the past 2 decades, cancer has been the leading cause of death worldwide. Accordingly, cancer patients are the largest group of patients admitted to a hospice, accounting for 40% of overall hospice admissions every year. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to investigate the outcomes of caring for cancer patients at hospices. Methods PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched for English language articles published during the period from January 2008 to January 2022. The keywords used to search in this systematic review were included hospice, cancer, and neoplasm (for PubMed search only), which were searched in the titles and abstracts of the articles. Results Out of 803 articles found in the initial search, 38 were selected based on inclusion criteria. The studies indicated that hospice care resulted in outcomes such as reduced referral and admission to the emergency department (only one study reporting opposite results), reduced length and number of hospital admissions, reduced use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, increased pain reports, improved pain management, enhanced end-of-life quality, significantly reduced cost of treatment, reduced number of invasive interventions, death at home, increased survival and satisfaction of patients, and poor nutritional support. Conclusion Given the numerous and significant benefits of care in a hospice for cancer patients, health managers are recommended to consider developing hospices and introducing patients to these centers. Besides, they need to compensate for some shortcomings by, for example, providing better nutritional support and developing a care plan based on the type of cancers that the patients are suffering in hospices so that more specialized services can be delivered.