Finding evidence about the costs of palliative care: CareSearch's suite of search tools

What is already known about the topic?
• Access to reliable current information about the costs of palliative care is crucial to provide evidence to underpin service provision, to assist in clinical and policy decision making and to inform ongoing research.
• The vast and growing quantity of information about the costs of palliative care can be hard to navigate; it is stored in
many different databases, across disciplines, and indexed on a variety of platforms with differing terminology.
• Health practitioners, policymakers and researchers in palliative care may not readily have the time or expertise needed
to frame the detailed searches required to search the many different sources effectively.
What this paper adds
• The paper describes the development of a resource that facilitates the retrieval of current high quality literature about
economic aspects of palliative care.
• This paper highlights the importance of searching in multiple and appropriate databases for economics literature.
• The paper outlines the identification, testing and evaluation of existing search filters and other sources of information to
determine the best resources to use and the best terms to use for each one.
Implications for practice, theory or policy
• Anyone with web access can use the resource to reach globally published evidence and connect to evidence-based
information with one click, knowing that underneath is a search that has been tested.
• Evidence is thereby made available to inform practice for health practitioners in all disciplines associated with palliative
care, to underpin funding decision making for service providers and policymakers and to inform ongoing research.
• Links are provided to searches about the impact of costs for individuals, families and carers, in addition to general costs
and economic aspects of palliative care.