Introduction: In the last few years, there has been growing concern in the literature about issues related to end-of-life care in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs), with special attention on the family/patient unit, communication, and a dignified death.
Objective: To evaluate the experience and development of end-of-life care in PICUs through a literature review, by determining the type of studies that have been performed, their topics, the issues discussed, and their development in the last few years.
Material and methods: Review of the medical literature in Medline and the database of the National Library of Medicine Gateway, using the key words from MeSH: "end of life", "pediatric intensive care", "critical care", "palliative care", "death", and "compassionate care". The earliest year of the search was 1990. The languages selected were English and Spanish. Inclusion criteria were the relationship with the topic to be studied, excluding articles with no abstract. Additional searches were made of references in selected articles.
Results: Eighty-one articles were retrieved from the initial search. Of these, 43 were selected as the most relevant investigations in end-of-life care in ICUs and 18 placed special emphasis on the PICU. More than half of the articles (62 %) were reviews and the remaining articles were descriptive or observational studies. The number of publications increased after 1995. Most of the studies were performed in the USA or Canada and only three studies were performed in Spain.
Conclusions: In the last few years, several studies have been performed that reveal increasing concern about limits to therapeutic intervention and the need to improve end-of-life care in the PICU setting.