Home care nurses facilitating planned home deaths: a scoping review protocol.

Abstract

This scoping review aims to examine and map existing evidence on home care nurses facilitating planned home deaths, as well as to identify knowledge gaps important for further research on the topic. Nurses may be able to offer new models of care within the primary setting for palliative patients. There is some evidence for the efficacy of home based palliative care and dying at home, but there is a lack of information on how home care nurses facilitate planned home deaths. A preliminary search shows no ongoing or existing scoping reviews describing how home care nurses facilitate home deaths. Eligible studies will explore how home care nurses facilitate planned home deaths in home care services. Papers related to other health care professions will be excluded. The authors aim to include papers related to facilitating planned home deaths, understood as situations where patients receiving palliative care wish to die in their own home and where home care services help facilitate this. The setting is home care services. Studies focusing on other settings, such as nursing homes or institutions, will be excluded. Medical literature databases including MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, Google Scholar, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses will be searched. Retrieved papers will be screened for inclusion by two reviewers. Data will be extracted from included papers, and a narrative summary will accompany the charted results and describe how the results relate to the review objective.