The impacts of visitor restrictions for palliative patients during the COVID-19 pandemic on family members and healthcare providers: a Canadian qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Visitor restrictions to healthcare facilities were enacted throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and changed over time. Further research on the consequences of restrictions, particularly in relation to palliative care and from multiple key stakeholder perspectives, is needed. We investigated the impact of COVID-19 visitor restrictions on family members of patients with a life limiting diagnosis or who received palliative care during the pandemic, and health care providers (HCPs) for patients with life limiting diagnoses within New Brunswick, Canada. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 family members and 11 HCPs. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to allow for the inductive generation of themes from the qualitative data, while investigating and comparing participants' experiences. RESULTS: The analysis found that HCP and family member themes had a great deal of similarities. The themes developed for family members were: Visitor restrictions have negative impacts on palliative patients and their families; Visitor restrictions impacted patient-family care decisions and timing; Family members had more positive experiences when a patient-centred approach to care was used; Exceptions need to be made when it comes to palliative care and visitation; COVID restrictions didn't make sense; and, COVID led to healthcare providers being further overextended. HCP themes developed were: COVID restrictions and policies impacted satisfaction with work life; The impact of not visiting on families was terrible; HCP had to figure out new ways of providing care; We believe that patients need their families; Patients are lonely and miss family; Weren't always made clearly aware of the changes happening in hospital visitor restrictions; and, COVID restrictions led to people keeping loved ones at home. CONCLUSIONS: Results unveiled dynamic relationships between HCPs and family members, whose perspectives on the impacts of visitor restrictions overlapped. Main findings emphasized the overall negative impacts of visitor restrictions and a clear need to enact policies with a particular focus on understanding the need for a flexible patient and family-centred approach and quality of life considerations. Clear and consistent communication with all stakeholders regarding policies is recommended, as well as consistent exceptions for patients with life-limiting diagnoses.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".