Re: Jenni Burt, Rosalind Raine. The effect of age on referral to and use of specialist palliative care services in adult cancer patients: a systematic review. Age and Ageing (2006). Received 1 November 2005; accepted in revised form 2 February 2006 (pp. 1-8).

摘要

SIR-We are writing regarding the review on the effect of age on referral to specialist palliative care by Burt and Raine (2006). Burt and Raine state:Burt and Raine are referring to our paper (Ahmed et al, 2004) as one of the reviews which they assert failed to apply a quality assessment. In fact, as an extract from our systematic review published in Palliative Medicine 2004 shows, we did in fact apply a rigorous process of quality checking: