Palliative care is often started late in patients with life-threatening conditions, particularly in patients with advanced cancer. However, with the emergence of the early palliative care (EPC) paradigm, their quality of life (QoL) may be better. Although several previous meta-analyses support the effectiveness of EPC in increasing QoL, essential issues related to the optimisation of EPC interventions are still needed. A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were conducted to determine the effectiveness of EPC on the QoL of patients with advanced cancer. PubMed, ProQuest, MEDLINE through EBSCOhost and Cochrane Library and clinicaltrials.gov (register website) were searched for RCTs published before May 2022. Data synthesis used the Review Manager 5.4 to generate pooled estimates of effect size. A total of 12 empirical trials met the eligibility criteria and were included in this study. The results showed that EPC intervention had a significant effect (standard mean difference = 0.16, 95% confidence interval: 0.04, 0.28, Z = 2.68, P < 0.05). However, the secondary outcomes showed including mood (mean difference = −0.90, 95% CI: −2.32, 0.51, P > 0.05) and symptom controls (MD = −1.49, 95% CI: −3.81, 0.81, P > 0.05) had no significant effect. EPC is effective in improving the QoL of patients with advanced cancer. However, other outcomes still need to be reviewed, because the review of QoL is not enough to generalise the benchmarks for the effectiveness and optimisation of EPC interventions. Another notable aspect is to consider the most effective and efficient duration for starting and ending EPC interventions.

Discharge planning is one indicator of ongoing nursing services that if performed well by the nurses will be able to improve the quality of nursing services and patient satisfaction. One influential factor is the leadership of the head nurse, especially in the function of directing to nurses when carrying out discharge planning. The directional function carried out by the head nurse is in the form of giving motivation, supervision and conflict management. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the function of directional head nurse and the implementation of discharge planning nurses. The study design was descriptive correlational with a cross sectional time approach. The sample in this study were 56 nurses in the inpatient room of PKU Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta Hospital with a sampling technique using simple random sampling. The instrument used was a head nurse directional function questionnaire and discharge planning questionnaire implementation. The data analysis using the Kendall Tau statistical test. The results of this study showed that the assessment of direction function of head nurse were 27 people (48.2%) within adequate category, the implementation of discharge planning were 39 people (69.6%) within good category. The results of the Kendall Tau analysis test were p = 0.002 ( p <0.05). There is a relationship between the function of direction of head nurse to discharge planning nurses.