Do the Clinical Management Guidelines for Covid-19 in African Countries Reflect the African Quality Palliative Care Standards? A Review of Current Guidelines

Abstract

ContextPalliative care should be a component of COVID-19 management to relieve suffering, improve patient outcomes and save cost.ObjectivesWe aimed to identify and critically appraise the palliative care recommendations within COVID-19 case management guidelines in African countries.MethodsThe study employed systematic guideline review design. All guidelines from any country in Africa, of any language, published between December 2019 and June 2020 were retrieved through online search and email to in-country key contacts. We conducted a content analysis of the palliative care recommendations within the guidelines and appraised the recommendations using African Palliative Care Association standards for providing quality palliative care.ResultsWe retrieved documents from 29 of 54 African countries. Fifteen documents from 15 countries were included in the final analysis, of which eight countries have identifiable PC recommendations in their COVID-19 management guidelines. Of these eight, only one country (South Sudan) provided comprehensive palliative care recommendations covering the domains of physical, psychological, social and spiritual wellbeing, two (Namibia and Uganda) addressed only physical and psychological wellbeing while the remaining five countries addressed only physical symptom management.ConclusionsComprehensive palliative care which addresses physical, psychological, social and spiritual concerns must be prioritized within case management guidelines in African countries.

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© 2021 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2021.01.126

Repository URI

http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2927304