Introduction:

Health education actions are incipient in some hospitals. When it comes to performing such actions in the face of end-of-life situations, health teams have some limitations.

Objective:

To identify health education actions for in-hospital dying patients and their informal and formal caregivers, and to assess the level of evidence of such actions.

Content synthesis:

Study conducted between December 2019 and January 2020, in the databases Web of Science, Scopus and MEDLINE. A total of 6.762 articles were identified. Among these, 42 articles were considered as they met the following inclusion criteria: original or review article written in Portuguese, Spanish, English, or French, whose sample consisted of patients over 19 years with a terminal disease or at the end of their lives, or their caregivers or health professionals in charge of their care. The data were grouped by similarity of the actions deployed, following Polit and Beck, and the level of evidence evaluated, according to Melnyk and Fin-eout-Overholt. The video was the action with greater force of recommendation, followed by booklets. The thematic units were: "Actions for pain control", "Narratives about the end-of-life", "Advance care planning", "Talking about palliative care", and "Communication and end-of-life".

Conclusions:

Health education actions at the end of life should consider information and communication technologies, in addition to the sociocultural, clinical, and cognitive conditions during this stage.

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