Jun 11, 2021
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.