A systematic scoping review of pediatric palliative care interventions across Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa has found that published initiatives primarily emphasize health system strengthening and healthcare provider training, while assessments of direct patient- and caregiver-centered outcomes remain scarce. The investigation, which evaluated implementation across twenty-three African countries, revealed that although regional programs have successfully advanced workforce education, clinical mentorship, and service integration, multidimensional care components essential to pediatric palliative support—such as spiritual care, end-of-life care, and structured communication—continue to receive comparatively limited attention in the scientific literature.
Pediatric palliative care is defined as an essential component of comprehensive care for children living with serious illnesses, yet access across Africa remains substantially restricted despite persistent implementation efforts. Although diverse healthcare programs have emerged to support seriously ill children, evidence regarding the specific characteristics, implementation processes, and measurable outcomes of pediatric palliative care interventions had not previously undergone comprehensive synthesis across Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa, creating an important knowledge gap regarding how services are structured and evaluated.
To characterize these interventions and examine the palliative care domains and reported outcomes across the four African regions, the research team—including Zoey Hall, Ann A. Ogbenna, Corinne H. Miller, Karen Awura-Adjoa R. Coker, Victoria F. Grisanti, Elizabeth N. Christian, Grace X. Nelson, Deborah O. Ohanete, Nadia A. Sam-Agudu, Ashti Doobay-Persaud, and Chisom Obiezu-Umeh—conducted a scoping review in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews guideline. The researchers conducted comprehensive database searches across Embase, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and the African Index Medicus to capture eligible studies published from 2014 onward that documented pediatric palliative care programs implemented in the targeted regions, subsequently extracting and descriptively synthesizing intervention characteristics, palliative domains, and reported findings.
A total of ten studies met the established inclusion criteria, representing diverse operational settings that encompassed hospital-based programs, community initiatives, and home-based pediatric palliative care interventions. The geographical scope spanned twenty-three nations across Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa, notably incorporating an extensive regional healthcare network that covered fifteen French-speaking countries, demonstrating that implementation initiatives have been deployed across varied administrative and linguistic environments across the continent.
When analyzing the structural focus of the eligible interventions, the review determined that programs predominantly concentrated on workforce development and health system strengthening. These efforts were largely executed through structured healthcare provider training, clinical mentorship arrangements, the formal integration of pediatric palliative care into existing healthcare delivery services, and the establishment of referral pathways. In contrast, when examining specific palliative care domains, psychosocial support was only moderately represented across the literature, whereas critical areas including spiritual care, communication practices, and end-of-life care were addressed in noticeably fewer studies.
The reported outcomes in the reviewed literature similarly demonstrated a pronounced emphasis on provider- and system-level metrics rather than direct clinical experiences. Studies frequently documented significant improvements in healthcare provider knowledge, clinical confidence, successful service integration, and enhanced access to essential medicines. However, patient- and caregiver-centered outcomes, most notably pediatric quality of life and caregiver burden, were evaluated much less frequently, indicating that existing evaluations have favored institutional feasibility and capacity metrics over direct measures of patient and family well-being.
Based on these findings, the authors concluded that current evidence on pediatric palliative care implementation in Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa remains disproportionately centered on workforce capacity building and health system integration, leaving the multidimensional domains required for comprehensive palliative care comparatively underexamined. Moving forward, the review emphasizes that future research must prioritize holistic care models that seamlessly integrate psychosocial support, spiritual care, effective communication, and end-of-life care, while systematically evaluating patient- and caregiver-centered outcomes alongside necessary provider- and system-level improvements.
Subject of Research: Characteristics, implementation, and outcomes of pediatric palliative care interventions across Africa
Article Title: Pediatric palliative care interventions in Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa: a scoping review
Article References: Hall, Z., Ogbenna, A. A., Miller, C. H., Coker, K. A.-A. R., Grisanti, V. F., Christian, E. N., Nelson, G. X., Ohanete, D. O., Sam-Agudu, N. A., Doobay-Persaud, A., & Obiezu-Umeh, C. (2026). Pediatric palliative care interventions in Eastern, Central, Southern, and Western Africa: a scoping review. BMC Palliative Care. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-026-02424-2
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12904-026-02424-2
Keywords: pediatric palliative care, scoping review, Eastern Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, Western Africa, PRISMA-ScR, African Index Medicus, workforce development, provider training, clinical mentorship, health system strengthening, referral pathways, essential medicines, psychosocial care, spiritual care, end-of-life care, caregiver burden, quality of life
Source: bioengineer.org
