‘It’s hard not to feel like somehow I fell short’: A discourse analysis of palliative care providers’ experiences with patients’ nonphysical suffering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The relief of patients' suffering is central to the philosophy and practice of palliative care. Few studies have focused on interdisciplinary palliative care providers' experiences in addressing patients' nonphysical suffering-suffering that is emotional, psychological, social, spiritual, and/or existential in nature. This study contributes to and expands the empirical knowledge base in this area. Objective: To identify existing discourses within how palliative care providers talk about their experiences working with patients' nonphysical suffering, and how these discourses may affect palliative care providers and impact clinical care. Design: . Methods: Twenty-four interdisciplinary palliative care providers across Canada participated in semi-structured phone interviews in 2020. Eligible participants had a minimum of 2 years' experience providing palliative care to adult patients in diverse settings, and self-identified as having experience working with patients' nonphysical suffering. Results: Two competing discourses shape providers' work with patients' nonphysical suffering: (1) 'Expectations of palliative care to relieve nonphysical suffering' and (2) 'Barriers to nonphysical suffering's relief'. The expectation that palliative care will relieve patients' nonphysical suffering emanates from patients and families, from medical teams outside of palliative care, and from providers themselves. Multiple barriers to nonphysical suffering's relief exist at the patient, provider, and systems levels. Providers may experience helplessness, and inadequacy, and can avoid patients' nonphysical suffering when they feel unable to relieve it. Conclusion: Palliative care has long ascribed nonphysical suffering's relief to the ability of a patient to transcend their own suffering, or a palliative care provider to facilitate/support that transcendence. Findings call into question and expand this long-standing discourse by pushing the field to consider how multiple intersecting barriers at patient, provider, and systems levels shape-and limit-palliative care's call for the relief of nonphysical suffering. Findings have implications for patient care, and interdisciplinary palliative care training, education, and research.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".