Nurse-physician Communication around Identifying Palliative Care Needs in Nursing Home Residents

Objective To assess experiences of medical practitioners who are on the staff of nursing homes with communication with nursing staff about identifying emerging and changing (palliative) care needs of residents of nursing homes in the Netherlands. Design Qualitative interview study. Setting and Participants Fifteen physicians and two nurse practitioners employed by eight care organizations in the western urbanized region of the Netherlands. Methods We conducted individual semi-structured interviews in 2018 informed by a topic list that was based on a qualitative dataset about facilitators to palliative care in dementia reported by elderly care physicians. The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed with Atlas.ti. We used both deductive and inductive coding adding refined codes related to communication. Results All interviewees expressed appreciation for nursing staff on whom they relied to communicate palliative care needs, yet they reported a variety of communication challenges around important changes in resident’s condition which were covered by two themes. (1) Teamwork was facilitated or impeded by team size and structure, quality of relationships and clarity in hierarchical relationships. (2) Continuity of information was affected by (in)effective routes of consultation and (lack of) detail in communicating observations. Conclusions and Implications Also in the case of on-staff physicians, functioning of the multidisciplinary team and accurate sharing of observed changes in nursing home residents’ condition are crucial for physicians to be able to address palliative care needs. The physicians’ expressions of how they would favor nursing staff to communicate can inspire interprofessional training, such as reporting objective observations and phrasing a clear request for help while avoiding overly demanding appeals.