Palliative care professionals | |
Longer-term service provision | “Recognising the need but not being able to back it up with longer-term intervention” |
“Short-term intervention and longer-term follow-up and review may be needed” | |
“Discharging patients after a short intervention, particularly if the service has made a difference to patient and families” | |
“Discharge at the end of the intervention may be difficult as the patient has benefited from the intervention and may be reluctant to stop it. This may be particularly difficult also for carers…” | |
“Ending the contact after specified time as I think we are generally not very good in SPC at discharging patients/terminating our involvement…” | |
“Time constraints - therapy intervention cannot always be addressed and completed within 6–8 weeks and require longer-term follow-up…” | |
Resources | “Workforce concerns for current team delivering SIPC” |
“If successful, there would be funding/capacity issues if the service was to continue” | |
“Time, money” | |
“Time pressures especially if majority want home visits” | |
“Time and resources” | |
Clinician awareness and acceptance | “Lack of understanding what can be done. Not appreciating the importance for regular review” |
“Recognition of need for palliative care” | |
“Making sure all teams aware how to access service & aware of its role” | |
“I think there is a mismatch between what neurology think palliative care can offer and what we think we can offer…” | |
Patient perceptions and acceptance | “Patient and carer perceptions of palliative care and the role of specialist palliative care teams” |
“Reluctance to attend due to preconceptions of hospice being only for people to die in rather than seeing us as a team to help manage symptoms and discharge back to community care - with ongoing support as necessary” | |
“Patients who feel they have already tried everything and are fairly rigid in their approach to trying different ways of doing things, for many versed and valid reasons” |
MS, multiple sclerosis; SIPC, short-term integrated palliative care; SPC specialist palliative care.