Holistic Assessment in Palliative Care

Dear Colleagues,

Palliative care has evolved into a critical component of modern healthcare, offering support that extends far beyond symptom control to address the complex physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of individuals with serious illnesses. As populations age and the burden of chronic and life-limiting conditions continues to rise globally, the demand for comprehensive, person-centered models of care has never been greater. Holistic assessment is an approach that systematically evaluates the multidimensional needs of patients and their families and serves as the foundation of high-quality palliative care. It ensures that interventions are aligned with patients’ values, cultural contexts, goals and lived experiences.

Despite substantial progress in palliative care delivery, gaps persist in the consistent application of holistic assessment across settings, populations and clinical disciplines. Variability in training, resource constraints, health disparities and the absence of standardized frameworks often limit the clinicians’ ability to fully capture and respond to patients’ evolving needs. Strengthening the science and practice of holistic assessment is therefore pivotal to improving patient outcomes, promoting equity, and enhancing the overall quality of palliative care. This research area is essential not only for guiding individualized care but also for informing policy, shaping clinical guidelines, and advancing the integration of palliative principles throughout the healthcare continuum.

This Special Issue seeks to bring together rigorous empirical research, theoretical advances, clinical implementation studies, and policy-oriented analyses that advance the science and practice of holistic assessment in palliative care. It will focus on better understanding how multidimensional assessments—incorporating physical symptoms, psychosocial needs, spiritual and existential concerns, caregiver/family dynamics, and health system factors—can inform personalized and value-driven palliative care pathways. Contributions may include development or validation of assessment tools, mixed-methods or implementation studies of holistic assessment in diverse settings, linkage of assessment data to outcomes (patient, caregiver and system) and policy/organizational analyses that enable holistic assessment to be embedded in routine palliative care workflows. The goal is to deepen the evidence base for holistic assessment, identify best practices and gaps and promote interdisciplinary and person-centered approaches to palliative care delivery.

Relation to the Journal’s Scope

The journal, Healthcare, covers all aspects of medicine and healthcare research, including clinical care, long-term care, health systems, quality of care, health policy and implementation in real-world settings. MDPI’s Holistic Assessment in Palliative Care fits squarely within this scope: it is fundamentally about improving quality of care and healthcare delivery for patients with serious illness; it involves clinical care (symptom management and psychosocial care), health services (how assessment is embedded in workflows and systems) and health policy/implementation (how to scale and sustain comprehensive assessment practices within health systems). The topic is neither too broad nor too narrow: it focuses on a specific domain (palliative care) and a clearly defined process (holistic assessment), yet allows a variety of approaches (tool development, clinical studies and system-level research) and settings (hospitals, hospices, community and global). Thus, it aligns well with the journal’s goal of publishing rigorous healthcare research that spans from the patient level to systems and policy.

In this Special Issue, original research articles, systematic reviews, narrative reviews, brief reports, qualitative studies, methodological papers and implementation-focused manuscripts are welcome. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Development, validation or adaptation of holistic assessment tools for palliative care across diverse patient populations and clinical settings.
• Symptom burden, psychosocial, spiritual and existential needs assessment and their integration into individualized care plans.
• Culturally responsive and equity-focused approaches to holistic assessment, including studies addressing disparities in access, communication and care experiences.
• Caregiver and family assessment within palliative care frameworks, including interventions informed by holistic evaluation of caregiver needs.
• Digital health, AI and technology-enabled assessment methods, including remote monitoring, EHR-integrated tools and decision-support systems.
• Implementation science, workflow integration and quality improvement studies examining how holistic assessments are operationalized in real-world clinical environments.
• Interprofessional education and training models that enhance clinicians’ capacity to conduct comprehensive palliative assessments.
• Outcomes research linking holistic assessment practices to patient-reported outcomes, caregiver well-being, healthcare utilization and quality of care.
• Global health and cross-cultural perspectives on holistic assessment in palliative care delivery.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Divya S. Subramaniam
Dr. Zidong Zhang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.