Hospice services as experienced by long term care nusring staff and their perception of resident experiences

Abstract

The current study utilized qualitative methods to understand long term care (LTC) nursing staff's experience with hospice services and their perceptions of how their residents have experienced hospice services. More specifically, this study sought to understand nursing home residents choices to utilize hospice services, as well as understand differences LTC nurses have experienced in regards to these deaths. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was utilized to extract themes and subthemes from 10 interviews that occurred with LTC nursing staff. Four main themes were extracted from the data. These main themes are: LTC nursing participant's positive view of hospice, their perception that residents view hospice very negatively, why residents choose to utilize hospice services, and why residents choose not to utilize hospice services. A number of subthemes were extracted as well. Content analysis was also utilized to extract one noteworthy concept that did not fit within the guidelines of IPA, which was a comparison of two resident deaths, one that occurred with and without the utilization of hospice services. These themes and the noteworthy concept pointed to a contradiction between the LTC nursing staff's positive view of hospice and their belief that their residents view hospice services very negatively.