What Are Palliative Care Patients And Their Carers’ Perceptions Of The Quality Of End Of Life Care? (2008)

Palliative Care Patients Dissertation – Palliative care is becoming a prevalent issue within contemporary nursing practice. Tools to improve the standard of palliative care have been implemented throughout the National Health Service (NHS), therefore recognising the importance of high quality palliative care.

The purpose of this critical review is to determine the perceptions and experiences of palliative care patients and their carers. In order to do so a number of issues will be explored. They include, individuality, choice, preferred place of care, involvement of the district nurse and the tools used in practice that influence perceptions of quality of care.

This review uses qualitative research papers to explore these concepts. The data used was found as a result of a structured search of online databases, the Cochrane library and also hand searched grey literature. A wealth of research was uncovered as a result. The final selection of research to be used was carried out by using standardised forms which first aimed to see if the research met the PIO structure of the focused question by looking at the title and abstract and secondly, by seeing if they met the PIO structure by studying the whole document.

This left seven research articles to be used within the review. The results of this review reflect current literature. Preferred place of care, although widely recognised as an important issue, was not always where the patient was cared for. The reasons behind a patient’s choice to be cared for at home included quality of care issues and being close to their family. Those stating that they wished to be cared for elsewhere gave reasons such as poor past experiences of death at home, fear of being a burden to others and availability of carers.

• 15,000 words- 110 pages in length
• Excellent use of literature
• Good in depth analyses
• Excellent piece of work
• Ideal for nursing students

1 – Current Literature

2 – Aims and Objectives
Operational Definitions

3 – Criteria for considering studies in the review
Types of studies to be included
Exclusion and Inclusion criteria

4 – Sources of evidence
Terms searched
Number of articles found

5 – Selection for inclusion in review
First selection on titles and abstracts only
Final selection based on full article
Assessment of methodological quality
Data extraction

6 – Results of the search
Themes

7 – Discussion

8 – Conclusion

References

Appendix