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Record W4413452798 · doi:10.1002/wjs.70070

A Scoping Review on Goals of Care Discussions in Surgery: How Are We Doing and How Can We Do Better?

2025· review· en· W4413452798 on OpenAlexaff
Amanda Mac, Yerin Lee, Selena Zhang, Abu Sadat Mohammad Nurunnabi, Marina Englesakis, Karen Devon

Bibliographic record

VenueWorld Journal of Surgery · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicPatient-Provider Communication in Healthcare
Canadian institutionsUniversity Health NetworkWomen's College HospitalPublic Health OntarioUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCardiac surgeryVascular surgeryCardiothoracic surgeryAbdominal surgeryMedicineGeneral surgerySurgery

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Discussing GOC is essential to ensuring that patients' treatment recommendations and care plans are aligned with their preferences, priorities, and values. This review aims to characterize the existing literature on the quality, practices, and frameworks of goals of care (GOC) discussions in surgery to identify gaps and propose strategies for improvement. METHODS: MEDLINE, MEDLINE In-Process/ePubs, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Web of Science, Scopus, and ClinicalTrials.Gov were searched using terms related to GOC, surgery, and best practices or education. The search strategy was run from inception to July 29, 2022. Studies regarding the quality of GOC discussions in surgery were included. RESULTS: The search identified 14,254 articles from which 37 were included for review. Key findings included (1) the reactive nature of GOC discussions and initiating conversations in response to acute health changes, (2) ambiguity around patient autonomy and the surgeon's duty to prioritize surgical treatment, (3) surgeons as curators of information, and (4) tendency of surgeons to provide a set of standard treatment pathways and determine specific care decisions rather than establish understanding of patients' long-term goals. CONCLUSION: Further research is needed to determine best practices for caregiver and next-of-kin involvement and expand the diversity of reported experiences to include patients from diverse ethnic backgrounds and genders and individuals from rural and lower-resource communities. Findings from this review have important implications for improving GOC conversations to ensure they support patient-centered care.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.031
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.136
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.031
Threshold uncertainty score0.166

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0310.136
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0060.007
Bibliometrics0.0200.026
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0070.007
Open science0.0030.004
Research integrity0.0040.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.306
GPT teacher head0.461
Teacher spread0.156 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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