Acknowledging existential moments and meaning-making in palliative care: A hermeneutic study of physicians’ experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective. Witnessing existential suffering in patients is associated with increased risks of compassion fatigue and burnout in palliative care physicians. Finding meaning is a protective factor for burnout and is associated with increased job satisfaction and a sense of purpose. While the significance of finding meaning through the doctor-patient relationship is widely recognized, less is known about the subjective experience of palliative care physicians, how they ascribe meaning, and how meaning sustains them. The aim of this study was to describe and interpret how palliative care physicians experience meaning when caring for patients. Method. Hermeneutic-phenomenology, inspired by the philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer, informed the methodological approach. Ten palliative care physicians, caring for adult patients, completed semi-structured interviews. Van Manen’s “lifeworld existentials” supported our reflexive hermeneutic analysis to interpret participants’ moments of meaning-making. Results. Our analysis identified two interpretive concepts for meaning-making: moments of connection and moments of transformation. Meaningful connection occurred when physicians and patients together acknowledged existential suffering in death and dying and experienced it on a personal, human level. Often, experiences were fleeting but had a lasting impact. Experiences of connection had a transformational effect on physicians and were associated with a sense of reward and purpose in palliative care work. Significance of results. Findings are discussed in relation to philosophical literature on the experience of time, contrasting man-made time with the existential experience of time. Moments of connection and transformation experienced by palliative care physicians fueled their commitment to their profession. At a time when burn-out is rife, identifying, describing, and understanding moments of meaning may offer protective benefits for physicians working in palliative care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".