Factors That Determine the Experience of Transition to an Inpatient Palliative Care Unit for Patients and Caregivers: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Transitions in care settings near the end of life can present challenges to patients and families, especially when there are also adjustments in level of care and illness trajectory. In this study, we explored what factors influenced how patients and family caregivers experienced a transition to an inpatient Palliative Care Unit (PCU). Methods: This qualitative study was conducted at a PCU in Toronto, Canada. Semi-structured interviews were held with 29 participants (14 patients and 15 family caregivers) during their time on the PCU. Data was analyzed through an iterative process of constant comparison to generate themes. The recruitment process continued to the point of thematic saturation. Results: Five themes were identified that represented the participants’ experiences in transitioning to the PCU: Being prepared, Feeling supported, Coming to terms with end of life issues, Dealing with uncertainty, and Continuity of care. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the need for clear and iterative communication with patients and family caregivers during the transition to a PCU. Identification and consideration of the common themes involved in the experience of transfer to PCU can help guide future practice and improve the experience of patients and families during transitions at the end of life.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".