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Article History

Received: 1 August 2019

Accepted: 10 May 2020

First Online: 28 May 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Medical Association of Hamburg, Germany (PV4981). Patient consent for the given study was as follows: Patients gave written informed consent concerning the use of socio-demographic and disease-related data included in the respective patient record as determined in the regular medical treatment contract. In addition, patients gave verbal consent concerning all self-assessments. Since the latter is part of routine assessment the consent was obtained at the first clinical encounter after admission and was conducted by the treating palliative care specialist (physician) in the patient’s room. Any identifiable data were removed from the dataset during analysis.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.