Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Dec 2013
Review Meta Analysis'Best practice' in developing and evaluating palliative and end-of-life care services: a meta-synthesis of research methods for the MORECare project.
Improved and cost-effective palliative and end-of-life care is an international policy imperative. Developments are impeded by a weak and often inconsistent evidence base. ⋯ The complexity of delivering and evaluating palliative and end-of-life care services requires the accumulation of knowledge from multiple sources to understand the active components of an intervention to deliver patient benefit and examine the evaluation methods to detect change and reveal processes prior to a definitive trial. The implementation of evidence into practice should form a continuum throughout the evaluation stages to reveal understanding on the process of intervention delivery, the context and the intended outcome(s).