Narrative methods in rehabilitation and palliative care in Scandinavian

Background: Although narratives including the ill person’s life story, life situation and future perspectives seem to be at the core of rehabilitation and palliative care in Scandinavian countries, we lack a scope of how, when and where narrative methods are used. Such a scope could provide knowledge and inspiration on a practical as well as a policy level. The objectives of this study is to explore the literature of the use of systematic narrative methods in rehabilitative and palliative care for people with life threatening illness in the Scandinavian countries.
Method: We conducted a scoping review in accordance with PRISMA-ScR where applicable. A systematic search in Cinahl, Medline, PsychInfo, SOCIndex and SveMed+ on the search terms ‘life threatening illness’, ‘narratives’ ‘rehabilitation’, ‘palliative care’ and ‘Scandinavia’ where followed by a search for grey literature. Forty-two records were found eligible to this scope and data was extracted through piloted extraction tables.

Results: We identified 17 narrative methods and present findings concerning four themes 1) A record of narrative methods 2) Objective and theoretical framework of the narrative methods, 3) Content and form of the narrative methods and 4) Significance of the use of narrative methods.
Conclusion: Narrative methods are used in systematic ways in rehabilitation and palliative care in Scandinavian countries and cover a great variety of objectives, theoretical frame, form and outcome.
Further development may benefit from more elaboration on definitions and the relation between objectives, theoretical framework and outcome.