Sage Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care

This episode features Caitlin Spooner (Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, University College London, London, UK).  What is already known about the topic? - Currently, there is no gold standard for evaluating how different methods of prognosticating in advanced cancer impact on patient care. - Prognostic models are principally evaluated by their statistical performance, determining their discrimination and calibration. However, before any prognostic model can be recommended for use in clinical practice, it is necessary to demonstrate whether or not it has a beneficial impact on patient care. - There is a lack of consensus among stakeholders about how to assess the impact of prognostication in advanced cancer, with prognostic studies varying in the outcomes they select.  What this paper adds? - We identified a wide variety of outcomes and measures used in published studies, which makes inter-study comparability problematic. - Our findings highlight the widespread effect that prognostication in adv