CN32 - Exploring the content and outcomes of meaning-centered interventions in palliative care: A scoping review

Background

Palliative care patients experience existential suffering in terms of psychosocial and spiritual distress and physical pain. Meaning-Centered Interventions have been proposed to be an effective method for improving patient outcomes, reducing psychological and spiritual distress in advanced cancer patients. The aim of the scoping review was to explore the contents, outcome measures, and results of Meaning-Centered Interventions in Palliative Care.

Methods

The PRISMA-ScR checklist and scoping review recommendations were followed. Related databases searched for studies published in English, including PubMed, Ebsco, PsycINFO, and Scopus. Randomized controlled and interventional studies using meaning-centered interventions published from 2000 to April 2023 involving palliative care or advanced cancer patients were included. Two authors conducted the literature search and study selection process independently on the COVIDENCE system. Studies were assessed for design, sample, randomization, setting, administrators of the intervention, outcome measures, intervention content and duration, control group, and results.

Results

A total of 133 studies were imported for screening and ten studies were included in the scoping review after duplicates and irrelevant articles were removed. Five articles described the pilot study, four randomized controlled trials, and one arm feasibility trial. Six studies were from the USA, two from Spain, one from Australia, and Iran. Interventions were delivered by a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, social worker, or doctoral student in clinical psychology, mostly 8 (3 to 10) sessions weekly as a group (n=5), individual psychotherapy (n=4); in the outpatient setting (n=6), at home and videoconference.

Conclusions

Patients receiving meaning-centered interventions showed significantly greater improvement in spiritual well-being, quality of life, and sense of meaning, and reductions in levels of depression, demoralization, hopelessness, death anxiety, desire for hastened death, and physical symptom distress compared with those receiving standard care. Meaning-centered interventions can be considered and adopted in other countries for patients receiving palliative care.

Clinical trial identification

Editorial acknowledgement

Legal entity responsible for the study

The authors.

Funding

Has not received any funding.

Disclosure

All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.