Palliative care in intensive care units: an integrative review

Abstract

Our integrative review sought to identify therapeutic decisions for palliative care in intensive care units. Bibliographic search conducted on the Virtual Health Library using the descriptors “palliative care,” “intensive care units” and “delivery of health care” returned 1,579 studies, of which seven were included in the final sample. Textual analysis was performed using the Iramuteq software. From the main results and words—”patient,” “end of life,” “family,” “intensive care unit,” “hospital”—we produced a co-occurrences tree, resulting in two categories and four subcategories. Currently, the spread of chronic noncommunicable diseases and increased life expectancy call for the large-scale use of this type of care, improving quality of life, care and academia.