Emotional disclosure in palliative care: a scoping review of intervention characteristics and implementation factors

SAGE Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care

This episode features Daisy McInnerney (Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, Division of Psychiatry, UCL, London, UK). Emotional disclosure -based interventions can improve psychological and physical wellbeing in general populations. A range of emotional disclosure-based interventions exist, but evidence of their efficacy in palliative care is mixed; it is not clear in which forms they may be effective or most effective, and on which outcome. Trials have been limited in the extent to which they have tailored the intervention for people with advanced disease. To our knowledge, this is the first scoping review to systematically map the characteristics of emotional disclosure-based interventions that have been tested in people with advanced disease. By grouping intervention characteristics into classes within operative domains and mapping these to outcomes, we provide a picture of which intervention forms may be most promising to pursue in future research. Disease stage, environment, flexibility in delivery and topic, clarity of instructions and staff training are identified as important factors to consider when tailoring emotional disclosure based interventions for people with advanced disease. The review provides an exemplar approach to scoping literature to inform complex intervention development and evaluation in cases where pre-existing findings are mixed. The review highlights the need for researchers to report key facilitators and barriers they find in intervention implementation and efficacy when presenting results. Researchers should consider the recommendations made in this review to inform development and evaluation of emotional disclosure-based interventions tailored for people with advanced disease.