Background: The lack of consumer knowledge and misconception of services could impede requests for and acceptance of palliative care. YouTube has been widely used for health information dissemination. Objective: To explore the availability and characteristics of palliative care educational videos on YouTube and determine how palliative care is portrayed in these videos. Methods: Keyword search and snowball methods were used to identify palliative care videos on YouTube. A structured data collection protocol was developed to record characteristics of a video. Descriptive analysis was used to describe the video features; logistic regression was conducted to determine the association between video characteristics and number of views per day. Results: A total of 833 videos were screened; 84 met criteria for analysis. The most prominent video styles were providing palliative care information (85%) and personal testimony (50%). One-third were uploaded by hospice/palliative care services or medical organizations, while another one-third by advocacy organizations. More than two-thirds mentioned "end-of-life" and 35% mentioned "hospice." Physicians most frequently appeared and served as protagonists. Protagonists were primarily female (71.0%), aged 18-64 years (81.7%), and white (90.3%). Compared with videos uploaded by health care agencies, those uploaded by advocacy organizations had 6.41 times higher odds of having more than one view per day (p = 0.002). Conclusion: Online videos may not provide accurate and appropriate information on palliative care. There is minimal ethnic diversity in terms of physician and family representation. More research is needed to determine the effectiveness of these videos in improving consumer knowledge of palliative care.
Keywords: YouTube; educational video; palliative care.