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Sharing Current Scottish Practice

Poster Abstracts of the month: September

The SPPC Annual Conference in 2016 featured 36 poster displays, sharing work and research underway across Scotland. Each month, this blog focuses on the content of a few of these posters. This month, we focus on:

"The Breath of Life: The Whole Shebang!" A Quality Improvement Project to Develop a Self-Management Programme for Breathlessness

Author(s)

Dadd M, Milligan S, Mills A, Murray R, Park R, Rooney KD and Sime C

Background: Breathlessness is a distressing and complex symptom that can profoundly affect a person’s life, leading to loss of independence, increased distress and reduced quality of life. Evidence suggests that in conjunction with optimised medications, teaching people self-management techniques and offering psychological support can improve physical well-being, personal coping strategies and quality of life.

Project Aim: To develop a sustainable 12 week self-management programme for people living with end stage breathlessness.

Methods: Utilising the model for improvement, the multidisciplinary team set an aim, and developed a change package informed by current evidence. Continuous Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles were used to improve the programme. Twelve potential participants were identified and four accepted the invitation and completed the programme.

Results: Improvements were identified in participant’s social capital, long-term coping strategies and self-management of their breathlessness. However, the patient-reported outcome measures demonstrated few sustained improvements in symptom burden.

Conclusion: In keeping with current evidence, this project found most people living with breathlessness do not require a self-management programme. However, this pilot confirmed there is a need to provide additional support for some people living with complex symptoms. Furthermore, using a continuous improvement approach facilitated the co-production of a successful self-management programme.

The Development of Carer Services within the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice

Author(s)

McCaffrey S and McNair T

The Carers Choice Service offers carers of people with palliative care needs with an opportunity to have a short break from their caring role, safe in the knowledge that their loved one is being cared for in their absence. The Bereavement visitor’s service offers a service of support to family members who are experiencing normal grief, with well trained and supervised volunteers. Both services offer the flexibility of being seen in your own home.

The poster highlights the development of Carer Services within the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice.

Feedback from carers describe the benefits of accessing supports away from the cared for person’s home. However they also describe the stress and anxiety about leaving the cared for person on their own, particularly when the caring role becomes more demanding or the health of the cared for person is less stable or predictable. Developing a therapeutic befriending service for patients, will allow the carer to have a break from caring with the knowledge that their cared for person is well looked after, with both the carer and cared for person benefitting from the project.

Following the death of patients, carers are offered a wide range of services by the family support service, one of which is one to one counselling. However, a large number of bereaved family members experience normal grief, which does not require formal counselling. The bereavement visitor’s service fulfils this role. Offering knowledge and understanding of normal grief process provided in the bereaved persons home.

Turning Best Supportive Care into Active Care. A service development for patients with advanced lung cancer

Author(s)

Bowden J, Boyce S, Fenning S, Macpherson C, and Scragg S

In Southeast Scotland, approximately 40% of patients with lung cancer are for ‘best supportive care’ at diagnosis. Many more transition into BSC following palliative treatment/disease relapse. But there is no consensus about what constitutes BSC and who should deliver it. As a consequence, patients, carers and families can enter a care void and professionals are unclear about who is providing what support.

For those in the BSC category, survival is usually in the order of weeks. High rates of comorbidity and socioeconomic deprivation coinciding with rapidly progressive and symptomatic cancer, predisposes patients to apparently unpredictable crises and hospital admissions.

Our NHS Fife palliative care service, supported by Macmillan and government funding, has developed an early palliative care intervention for patients with lung cancer for BSC. We now see all such patients from the point of diagnosis, in all care settings.

We report evaluation findings following 18 months of the pilot service, including our impact on quality of care and experience, hospital admissions and place of death. We consider which other patients, with both cancer and non-cancer diagnoses, might benefit from a ‘BSC’ approach. Finally we reflect upon the challenges of developing, delivering and evaluating a new service.

Understanding complex need in palliative care: the perceptions of professionals across 3 settings

Author(s)

Carduff E, Finucane A, Johnston S, Morrish J, Spiller J and Winstanley C

Introduction: Complex needs for palliative care patients are not well defined, yet clarity is necessary to meet the needs of patients and their families in all settings.

Aim: To explore professionals’ understandings of patient complexity in palliative care across 3 settings.

Methods: We triangulated the findings from 3 qualitative studies. Interviews were conducted with professionals from primary, specialist palliative and acute care, coded thematically and analysed by each study researcher, independently. As a team, a framework was devised to comprehensively collate, compare and contrast all three sets of results.

Results: Thirty-four interviews were conducted. A number of themes spanned all three settings. The interaction between diverse physical, psychosocial and spiritual needs, existing co-morbidities, intractable symptoms and complicated social issues exacerbated patient complexity. Poor communication was highlighted, particularly between generalists and specialists, although primary care professionals highlighted the potential of electronic care summaries. Generalists felt they lacked skill in identifying and caring for complex patients and time for professional development in palliative care.

Conclusion: Patient complexity is influenced by patient and environmental factors which are specific to each setting. Better communication between disciplines and a clear definition of complexity will improve the identification of patients for specialist palliative care.

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