Research & Reading

What we still don’t know

Open research questions, the evidence, and books and conversations on serious illness.

Covers of That Good Night, A Beginner’s Guide to the End, Heart Sounds, and Life After the Diagnosis

The academic lens

In November 2025, 28 surgical palliative care experts and researchers met to update the field’s research agenda, and named 11 research gaps. Five of them, in plain words:

Which patients benefit from surgical palliative care, and when.
Reaching patients beyond the groups it has traditionally served.
The core palliative care skills every surgeon needs, and when to call in specialty palliative care.
Clearer communication about what an operation is meant to do, its trade-offs, and decisions that depend on what matters to the patient.
Ways to measure success that center patients and fit the setting.

And one more, at the level of systems:

How palliative care can become a reliable part of routine surgical care, rather than depending solely on individual clinicians’ training or initiative.

Palliative Care in Surgery: Updated Research Priorities from the Surgical Palliative Care Research Expert Consensus Conference J Am Coll Surg 2026

See all in the Evidence Library →

Books & listening

Books that inform this work

A few from the Palliative Care & Serious Illness collection on my Books page, where each has its full entry.

That Good Night Sunita Puri, MD
Heart Sounds Dawn Gross
Life After the Diagnosis Steven Z. Pantilat, MD
Mastering Communication with Seriously Ill Patients Back, Arnold & Tulsky
Every Deep-Drawn Breath Wes Ely, MD

Browse the full Palliative Care & Serious Illness collection →

For listening, the Surgical Palliative Care shelf on my Podcasts page gathers conversations on communication, goals of care, and palliative principles in surgery.