Context

A key function of palliative care is to provide accurate information about prognosis with a level of specificity that patients and their families want. However, a large evidence base indicates that healthcare providers are often not able to make an accurate prognostic assessment and that prognostic predictions tend to be overly optimistic.1 2 Even palliative care providers, whose predictions should be the most accurate, tend to overestimate survival.3

This optimism bias is not homogeneous. In fact, providers working in specialised settings such as the intensive care unit may be able to make more accurate predictions.4 5 Nevertheless, most healthcare …