Large and growing population health needs for palliative care have been documented in international and national policy and research studies worldwide. Persons with serious illness account disproportionately for costs but experience poor outcomes, which are often modifiable (e.g. unmanaged pain, depression, fragmented care inconsistent with preferences). Despite the established prevalence of low-value care near end-of-life, evidence to inform service planning and improvement efforts is scant. This is especially true for economic evaluations, which are rare in the field.
There are multiple factors that may contribute to this, many of them related to the applied methodological approaches. The palliative and end-of-life sectors vary in many aspects from the curative ones and there is lack of consistent frameworks, guidelines and terminology in the field. For example, some specific areas of gaps include consistency in patient identification, patient follow-up, lack of gold standards for outcomes measures and limited and heterogeneous cost data. These issues may be particularly complex in low and middle-income countries. Consequently, the full costs, outcomes and effects of interventions may be unmeasured.
This proposal for a special series of Annals of Palliative Medicine aims to improve understanding on the value of palliative and end-of-life care interventions by inviting submissions on the outcomes and/or costs under economic evaluation. Our purpose is to advance the systematic and evidence-based methodological approaches and increase the rigor of future economic evaluations. We will give full consideration to empirical original research, conceptual and theoretical work, reviews and to applied research.
We welcome studies from all areas of the health and social care system, including informal and unpaid care and from all countries and regions. Invited articles in this series are free of charge. There is no submission fee for authors and no publication fee for accepted papers.
Potential practical and conceptual issues can be related (but are not limited) to the following topics:
- Applied economic evaluations of palliative and end-of-life interventions using generic methods (e.g. cost per QALY for the health system)
- Applied economic evaluations of palliative and end-of-life interventions testing methodological innovations (e.g. applying societal perspective, including outcomes beyond the patient);
- Applied economic evaluations comparing generic and innovative approaches;
- Approaches to outcome measurement (including patient reported outcomes) from interdisciplinary perspectives that better reflect needs of persons with palliative care and so may capture some hitherto unmeasured effects from palliative and end-of-life care;
- Measuring the impact of palliative and end-of-life care to the network outcomes (e.g. post-bereavement effects, assessment of the wide reach of these effects);
- Assessing costs beyond the health care sector (e.g. spillover costs for family, costs of informal caregiving, productivity losses);
- Applying approaches from other areas of (health) economics in palliative and end-of-life care (e.g. recent advances in quasi-experimental methods);
- Timely and targeted patient selection (e.g. advanced screening tools) for palliative and end-of-life phase;
Acceptance for the special issue occurs in three phases:
- Pre-selection. Authors should submit a title and abstract (max.300 words) of their planned study to the guest editor, Claudia Fischer, PhD (e: Claudia.fischer@meduniwien.ac.at) by July 31st, 2022.
- Invitation to submit. Feedback will be sent on all submissions by the beginning of September. Authors will be informed if their abstract is selected for submission of a full manuscript.
- Submission. Authors of selected abstracts are asked to submit the full manuscript by December 31st, 2022 for peer review.
For further information on this special series, please feel free to contact the guest (co-)editors.
Guest editor:
- Claudia Fischer, Medical University of Vienna, Department of Health Economics, Claudia.fischer[at]meduniwien.ac.at
Co-guest editors:
- Gudrun Maria Waaler Bjørnelv, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Public Health and Nursing and Department of Health Management and Health Economics, University of Oslo. gudrun.m.w.bjornelv[at]ntnu.no
- Rui Dang, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Economics Department, rui.dang84[at]gmail.com
- Peter May, Trinity College Dublin, School of Medicine, pemay[at]tcd.ie
- Preeti Pushpalata Zanwar, Jefferson College of Population Health, Thomas Jefferson University; NIA Funded Network on Life-Course Health Dynamics & Disparities; preeti.zanwar[at]jefferson.edu
