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Components of Perinatal Palliative Care: An Integrative Review

The systematic review primarily led to the development of an extensive list of care components.


The End of Life Care Research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University (Belgium) performed an integrative review of perinatal palliative care components in 2022.

Perinatal palliative care is an emerging field of multidisciplinary care provided when a severe diagnosis is made either before or shortly after birth aimed to improve the quality of life of patients and their families through prevention and relief of symptoms, whether physical, psychological, social or spiritual. As new programs are being developed internationally to provide such care, the possible beneficial impact is often hypothesized but has not yet been extensively evaluated. Additionally, components mentioned in existing perinatal palliative care programs seem to show a large variation without insight into the outcomes or effect evaluation of each provided component. We therefore aimed to perform an integrative review of relevant literature to provide an overview of the outcome and effectiveness evaluation of perinatal palliative care compared to regular care provided, and to detail which working components are incorporated in such perinatal palliative care.

The systematic search was conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, CENTRAL, CINAHL, PsychInfo and Web of Science. We identified a total of 21,893 records, resulting in 69 publications that met inclusion criteria after rigorous title, abstract and full text screening. Twelve publications (17,4%) discussed the effect of a PPC program. Other publications concerned the description of PPC programs, most often by means of a program description (22/69; 31.9%), guidelines (14/769; 20.3%) or case study (10/69; 14.5%). Outcome measures envisioned four main target categories: care coordination, parents and family members, care for the fetus/neonate, and healthcare providers. No trials exist to date.

An extensive list of care components
The systematic review primarily led to the development of an extensive list of care components that could possibly be included in perinatal palliative care programs, which can be used as a checklist for developing future perinatal palliative care initiatives worldwide. Every component is described in detail and can thus be adapted to fit specific needs of the setting, hospital or country wherein the newly developed program would be situated. However, another main message of this review is that evidence of outcomes and effectiveness of the individual components, or of perinatal palliative care programs as a whole is scarce. We can thus provide an extensive checklist on components that could be included in future initiatives, yet we can provide no insights into what actually contributes to better care. More research is needed to identify which care components are actually effective in providing better perinatal palliative care, and what should be envisioned as the main outcome measure of future randomized controlled trials on perinatal palliative care.


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