Revised European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) recommended framework on palliative sedation: An international Delphi study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) acknowledges palliative sedation as an important, broadly accepted intervention for patients with life-limiting disease experiencing refractory symptoms. The EAPC therefore developed 2009 a framework on palliative sedation. A revision was needed due to new evidence from literature, ongoing debate and criticism of methodology, terminology and applicability. AIM: To provide evidence- and consensus-based guidance on palliative sedation for healthcare professionals involved in end-of-life care, for medical associations and health policy decision-makers. DESIGN: Revision between June 2020 and September 2022 of the 2009 framework using a literature update and a Delphi procedure. SETTING: European. PARTICIPANTS: International experts on palliative sedation (identified through literature search and nomination by national palliative care associations) and a European patient organisation. RESULTS: to describe the untreatable (healthcare professionals) and intolerable (patient) nature of the suffering. The principle of proportionality is introduced in the definition of palliative sedation. No specific period of remaining life expectancy is defined, based on the principles of refractoriness of suffering, proportionality and independent decision-making for hydration. Patient autonomy is emphasised. A stepwise pharmacological approach and a guidance on hydration decision-making are provided. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first framework on palliative sedation using a strict consensus methodology. It should serve as comprehensive and soundly developed information for healthcare professionals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it