Hospice care providers experiences of grappling with medical assistance in dying in a hospice setting: a qualitative descriptive study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Rapid implementation of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) across care settings has challenged providers and organizations, including hospices, to develop and implement new modes of practice. The aim of this study was to examine the effects that legalization of MAiD has had on hospice care provider roles within the non-provider context. METHODS: Eight in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted and a qualitative descriptive approach used to examine hospice care providers experiences in a small western Canadian city. In the study context, patients who choose MAiD are cared for until immediately prior to the procedure when they are transferred off-site to undergo MAiD. Inductive and thematic analyses were undertaken. RESULTS: Participants experienced practical, philosophical, and professional challenges. Despite the overwhelming desire to support patient autonomy and decision-making, some interpreted patient choice for MAiD as rejection of the natural death experience at the hospice. Patient choice for MAiD initiated a new and different pathway of end-of-life care. While participants felt uncertain how best to support patients undergoing MAiD, they shared mixed optimism on how their care provider roles were evolving as their level of experience broadened. While implementation of MAiD was rapid, the introduction of practical and professional supports has remained slow to materialize, leaving many providers to navigate their own personal and professional positions and practices. CONCLUSION: Care providers require a multi-faceted range of clinical, legal, and logistical supports at the practice, organizational, and health system levels, to facilitate care delivery to those requesting and undergoing MAiD and to promote coordinated and holistic patient-centered care. The different pathway for those who chose MAiD may lead care providers to struggle with relational challenges and interpersonal unease. Further research may address how to support those undergoing MAiD within the hospice context.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".