The definition of palliative care by both the World Health Organization and Palliative Care Australia recognise that suffering may not be physical, and that care needs to include psychological, spiritual and social care and support.

This is an area where research evidence is still emerging and where research comes from other fields and disciplines.

These pages have been developed following an examination of the research evidence for the symptom as described in systematic reviews relevant to the topic. The systematic reviews were identified following a search for topic based systematic reviews in four databases - Ovid Medline, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Embase.

This page was created on 14 May 2008