Preferences for palliative care discussions in COPD
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Palliative care discussions in COPD - patients’ preferences and clinicians’ judgements
IRAS ID
203444
Contact name
Nuno C Tavares
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Southampton
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
COPD, or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, is a chronic life-limiting disease which causes airflow obstruction and progressive breathlessness. In the UK, it’s estimated that 3 million people have COPD and it’s responsible for 30,000 deaths a year.
During their disease trajectory, COPD patients experience several acute exacerbations which lead to hospital admissions, to prolonged mechanical ventilation and premature death. Therefore, COPD patients benefit from palliative care conversations because they require stand-by decisions as to how to proceed in the future. Currently, only a small proportion of patients discuss palliative care, despite more than half of patients wanting them. When these discussions do occur, most occur during an acute exacerbation, at very stressful times, and with a clinician who does not know the patient.
Therefore, to improve the frequency and quality of discussions a research study to understand the preferences of COPD patients and to understand clinicians’ judgement when starting conversations was developed.
The research study is divided into 3 phases:
Phase 1 - Systematic literature review about palliative care conversations in COPD.
Phase 2 – Interviews and case-note review of COPD patients in 3 different stages of disease severity: mild, moderate and severe. Each group will contain 7-15 patients and interviews will be stopped when data saturation has been achieved. Phase 2 aims to understand preferences of patients regarding time and nature of palliative care conversations with clinicians.
Phase 3 – Interviews with healthcare professionals.
Data gathered across all phases will be analysed using thematic analysis and simple descriptive statistics. This data will be used to answer the initial research question: How do COPD patients’ preferences and clinicians’ judgement shape the timing and nature of palliative care conversations?REC name
South Central - Hampshire B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/SC/0471
Date of REC Opinion
12 Jan 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion