Inclusion and exclusion criteria
LLD, multi-resistant infections
All participants were being treated in the palliative care ward of the University Hospital Bonn in Germany. Patients had to be conscious and alert and understand the German language well enough to complete the questionnaires. They had to provide informed consent to participate in the study.Patients were excluded if they were unconscious or severely fatigued. Potential test persons with multi-resistant infections could not provide saliva samples due to laboratory restrictions.All included patients were randomized to intervention or control group using a simple randomization list (using the random number generation function in Excel). The study was not blinded nor allocation concealed as the ethics committee had requested to include information on the specific burden related to participation in the study for each group. One of the authors (LLD), who is a researcher in the Department of Palliative Medicine, but not involved in clinical care, enrolled and assigned the patients to one of the groups. The power calculation resulted in overall 240 patients to achieve a medium effect of 