Understanding Occupations of Terminally Ill Chinese Adults and Their Caregivers: A Scoping Review

Abstract

This scoping review explored the occupations of terminally ill Chinese adults and their caregivers. Seven databases were searched for peer-reviewed journal articles published in English or Chinese before June 2020. Of the 16 studies that met the selection criteria, only one directly used the term “occupations” while the other 15 studies contained descriptions of occupations. Eight themes were extracted and compared with existing literature. The top two reported themes were occupations surrounding life roles and tasks and those surrounding food and eating. More study is required about the occupational engagement of this client group.

Keywords:

• Occupations
• terminally ill
• Chinese adults
• caregivers

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Dr Allyson Thomson for her contribution and input in study selection, data charting, review of codes/themes and quality appraisal of the English articles. We also wish to thank Dr Yeh I-Ling for her contribution and input into study selection, data charting, review and translation of codes/themes, quality appraisal of the Mandarin journal articles and Ms Jane Cai for the back translation of Mandarin codes/themes.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.