A cross-sectional study on the attitudes and perceptions of outpatients towards palliative care at the Hong Kong Queen Mary Hospital Hospice Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life for patients and their families, by helping them to cope with problems associated with illness. It targets four aspects of health: physical, psychological, social, and spiritual. Most of the current literature on palliative care is limited to the perspectives of health professionals. This study aims to investigate the views of outpatients receiving palliative care at the Hong Kong Queen Mary Hospital Hospice Centre (HKQMHHC), which offers palliative care services to cancer patients. METHODS: This observational cross-sectional study was performed with the completion of a single paper- based original questionnaire over 18 afternoon clinic sessions on Thursdays and Fridays from December 2017 to February 2018 at the HKQMHHC. The questionnaire was designed to examine patients' perspectives; in particular, the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) was used to assess their symptoms. Descriptive and univariate analyses were performed. RESULTS: One hundred patients attending HKQMHHC were included in the study. The study revealed that all the mean scores for aspects of care offered at the centre were above 8, on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being extremely inadequate and 10 being extremely adequate. Each respondent was able to identify an average of 1.82 of the 4 aspects of palliative care. Eighty-seven percent of respondents perceived the physical aspect of this care to be of the highest priority. A negative correlation (P<0.05) was found between the extent of symptoms experienced by the patient and their satisfaction towards the services offered. CONCLUSIONS: Patients generally held very positive attitudes, reflecting that the services sufficiently met their needs. However, owing to their rather limited knowledge, this may have restricted their perspectives to a largely superficial level, as many discerned palliative care to be simply targeting physical health with medical consultations. Considering the implications of the results, the addition of accessibility and education components to Hong Kong's current system of palliative care is crucial in the betterment of such services for patients. There should also be increased local coverage of palliative care services to facilitate convenience of access. With reference to the World Health Organisation (WHO) palliative care model, the inclusion of a continued spectrum of services, such as physical and mental health activities and psychosocial counselling, should be reinforced throughout the progression of disease so as to better help patients to cope with illness. The discovery of the relationship between extent of symptoms experienced and patients' satisfaction towards services provided is a new direction for further study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".