Background: Although palliative sedation therapy is often used in palliative care settings, no
clinical guideline is available.
Objective: To construct a clinical guideline for palliative sedation therapy
Design: The consensus methods using the Delphi technique on the basis of a systematic literature
review was used.
Setting/Subjects: A national multidisciplinary committee (five palliative care physicians,
four nurses, two oncologists, two psychiatrists, two anesthesiologists, two bioethicists, a medical
social worker, and a lawyer).
Measurements: Validity scoring based on the Delphi method and feasibility.
Results: After three sequential sessions of discussion by the Delphi method, an external review
by specialists, end-users, and bereaved family members, and a field test, a clinical guideline
for palliative sedation therapy was constructed. This guideline includes definitions of
palliative sedation therapy, description of the ethical basis of palliative sedation therapy, recommendations
about clinical practices in continuous-deep sedation, and diagrams illustrating
the clinical application of continuous-deep sedation.
Conclusion: We constructed a clinical guideline for palliative sedation therapy using the
Delphi technique. The clinical efficacy of this guideline should be tested in the future.
