Palliative Care Professionals’ Perceptions and Communication About Sexual Expression of Older Adults at End of Life: How Biases Compromise Holistic Care
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The sexuality of older people, which has historically been invisible, is increasingly represented and promoted in the media. However, the sexuality of the oldest older adults showing signs of frailty remains obscure and subject to ageist and ableist biases. Studies on sexual expression at the end of life have shown that sexuality and the need for support related to it remain important for many people. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: This article examines the perceptions and attitudes of professionals regarding the sexuality of older adults in palliative care, based on an exploratory qualitative study. Participants were recruited from several palliative care teams working either in hospital or in home settings in Canada. RESULTS: Professionals (n = 16) held two main views of sexuality: broad and holistic or narrow and genital-focused. Perceptions of sexuality in later life were either described as a continuation of or distinct from middle adulthood. No matter what views were held, most professionals did not discuss sexuality with their patients at the end of life. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: The lack of communication about sexuality may be largely due to professional's ageist, ableist, and heterosexist views regarding the sexuality of this population group. Results confirm the relevance of providing palliative care training about diverse sexual experiences and the importance of supporting older adults at the end of life with respect to their intimate and sexual needs. Such an approach is in line with the holistic vocation of palliative care.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 it