- Title
- Australian GPs' perceptions of barriers and enablers to best practice palliative care: a qualitative study
- Creator
- Herrmann, Anne; Carey, Mariko L.; Zucca, Alison C.; Boyd, Lucy A. P.; Roberts, Bernadette J.
- Relation
- NHMRC.1136168 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/1136168
- Relation
- BMC Palliative Care Vol. 18, Issue 1
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12904-019-0478-6
- Publisher
- BMC
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Background: General Practitioners (GPs) often play an important role in caring for people at the end of life. While some international studies suggest that GPs experience a number of barriers to providing palliative care, little is known about views and experiences of GPs in Australia. This study explored Australian GPs’ perceptions of barriers and enablers to the provision of palliative care and provides new insights into how to implement best practice care at the end of life.Methods: This was a qualitative study using 25 semi-structured phone interviews conducted with GPs practising in metropolitan and non-metropolitan New South Wales, Australia. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis.Results: GPs reported difficulties with palliative care provision due to i) the complex and often emotional nature of doctor-family-interaction; ii) a lack of evidence to guide care; and iii) the need to negotiate roles and responsibilities within the healthcare team. GPs listed a number of strategies to help deal with their workload and to improve communication processes between healthcare providers. These included appropriate scheduling of appointments, locally tailored mentoring and further education, and palliative care guidelines which more clearly outline the roles and responsibilities within multidisciplinary teams. GPs also noted the importance of online platforms to facilitate their communication with patients, their families and other healthcare providers, and to provide centralised access to locally tailored information on palliative care services. GPs suggested that non-government organisations could play an important role by raising awareness of the key role of GPs in palliative care provision and implementing an “official visitor” program, i.e. supporting volunteers to provide peer support or respite to people with palliative care needs and their families.Conclusions: This study offers new insights into strategies to overcome well documented barriers to palliative care provision in general practice and help implement optimal care at the end of life. The results suggest that researchers and policy makers should adopt a comprehensive approach to improving the provision of palliative care which tackles the array of barriers and enablers identified in this study.
- Subject
- palliative care; general practitioners; end of life care; qualitative study; implementation strategies; barriers; enablers; optimal care
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1415016
- Identifier
- uon:36846
- Identifier
- ISSN:1472-684X
- Rights
- © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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