During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization rapidly issued guidance on maintaining essential health services during the pandemic, highlighting prevention, maternity, emergency care and chronic diseases, without mention of palliative care. Palliative care is multidisciplinary, holistic and person-centered treatment, care and support for people with life-limiting illness, and those important to them, such as family and friends. In the COVID-19 pandemic, palliative care has an important role in ensuring symptom control, training of nonspecialists in symptom management and care of dying patients, compassionate communication, psychosocial support for patients, carers and health care professionals, advance care planning and bereavement support, supporting patients wherever they want to be cared for.

The CovPall (Rapid evaluation of the COVID-19 pandemic response in palliative and end of life care: national delivery, workforce and symptom management) study aimed to understand the response of and challenges faced by palliative care services during the COVID-19 pandemic and to identify factors associated with challenges experienced, in particular shortages of equipment, medicines and staff. It is the first multinational survey on the response of and challenges to palliative care services during the pandemic.

The study included a cross-sectional online survey of palliative care services and hospices, and a multicentre cohort study of COVID-19 patients seen and treated by palliative care services. It is made up of two work packages.

Work package 1 aimed to identify how palliative care and hospice services changed, how their staff, volunteers and others adapted their practices, and their challenges and innovations.

Work package 2 determined which symptoms and problems patients had, how they changed over time, and which treatments/therapies were used and seemed to work best.

This dataset covers WP1, the online survey of palliative care services, the first main component of CovPall. The survey opened on April 23rd, 2020 and closed on July 31st, 2020. 458 valid responses were collected: 277 UK, 85 rest of Europe, 95 rest of the world, 1 missing country. Overall, 261 services provided inpatient palliative care units, 261 home care teams, 217 hospital palliative care teams, and 119 home nursing teams. Services were usually publicly, or charity managed, and many services offered care in more than one setting.

More information regarding data collected during the survey, as well as a copy of the questionnaire used for data collection, can be found at the link below:

https://www.jpsmjournal.com/cms/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2021.01.138/attachment/23618c62-a710-4cad-8a27-326f24ed6f1a/mmc3.pdf