“Not Just Anybody Can Do It”: A Qualitative Study of the Lived Experience of Inpatient Palliative Care Professionals in China's Mainland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Over the past 5 years, China has invested substantially in palliative care programs to meet the rising demand for such services. In China's mainland, most palliative care programs are embedded within an established hospital unit, but a small subset of providers practice exclusively in a stand-alone inpatient palliative care department. Objective: To explore the lived experience of professionals at an independently operating palliative care hospital department in China's mainland. Design: We used purposive sampling to select palliative care physicians and nurses. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted in person. Thematic analysis was used to elicit key themes that pertained to participants' lived experience. Setting/Subjects: Ten palliative care physicians and seven nurses at the palliative medicine department in the West China Fourth Hospital of Sichuan University in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, participated in the interviews. Results: Three themes related to participants' lived experience were (1) interactions with patients and families (e.g., frequent encounters with death, communication difficulties, witnessing family struggles, and developing mutually trusting relationships); (2) factors influencing their work life (e.g., supportive working environment, unmet training needs, policy restrictions, and lack of public awareness); and (3) perceived nature of work (e.g., complex and demanding, underappreciation, encroachment of work stress into personal life, deriving accomplishment from work, and personal growth). Conclusion: This study helps fill the void in the palliative care literature regarding the lived experience of inpatient palliative care professionals in China's mainland. Our findings revealed factors influencing the well-being of palliative care professionals that are meaningful to policymakers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".