End-of-life care for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a scoping review protocol

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive inflammatory disease that has a typical illness trajectory. Awareness of unique disease courses as well as providing end-of-life care (EOLC) for COPD patients is important as most patients experience varied degrees of suffering toward the end-of-life. The purpose of this scoping review is to map out key concepts, main sources, and types of evidence available in the area of research on EOLC with multiple interventions for people with COPD.

This scoping review will be conducted following the latest Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) guidelines. In addition, this review process will adhere to the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR). The initial simple search concepts will be set out as “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” and “end-of-life care”. Based on the eligibility criteria, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), PubMed, CINAHL Ultimate, Embase, and Google Scholar databases will be searched, and all quantitative and qualitative studies of the after-year publication of each electronic database will be included. This process of literature selection will be carried out independently by each researcher. The results will be summarised in a narrative synthesis approach and the gaps and potential biases of the evidence identified by comparing the adopted articles for EOLC with multiple interventions for people with COPD.

This scoping review will outline in detail the evidence and the gaps from primary studies that have been gathered from the qualitative and quantitative literature based on all eligibility criteria. Therefore, the results of this review will contribute to a new field of systematic reviews. Furthermore, providing an outline of an EOLC for COPD in this study may improve the practice of healthcare professionals in this area. Ethical approval and consent are not required as no human participants were involved in this study.

This research has been registered in the Open Science Framework (OSF) (https://​osf.​io/​upd4a).