Healthcare workers’ knowledge of indicators for a palliative care approach

African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Healthcare workers’ knowledge of indicators for a palliative care approach
 
Creator Morgan, Jennie Amoore, Ruth Patel, Sadiya Z. Evans, Katya Krause, Rene
 
Subject — palliative care; health care workers; South Africa; SPICT-SA; primary health care; district health
Description Background: Palliative care is an essential element of universal healthcare, yet not all people who need palliative care are able to receive it. One of the barriers to ensuring access for people who require palliative care is the identification of those eligible.Aim: This study evaluated healthcare workers’ ability to identify patients who are eligible for palliative care based on their training or experience in palliative care.Setting: The setting for the study comprised the Heideveld Emergency Centre and Heideveld Community Day Centre in the Cape Metro, Cape Town, South Africa.Methods: This study made use of a cross-sectional survey of healthcare workers.Results: Of the 55 participants in this study, most were able to correctly identify patients with cancer and chronic kidney disease as needing palliative care, but less accurate with other organ failure categories, trauma indications, or functional assessment of the patient. Participants who reported previous awareness training reported improved knowledge on the indications for a palliative care approach compared to no prior training.Conclusion: Our cohort was too small to analyse the results statistically. From what was analysed, the ability of healthcare workers to identify a person in need of palliative care could be better; more work is needed on our awareness training and basic training courses to improve this vital step.Contribution: This research highlights the fact that existing training for palliative care needs to be more applicable to the setting and that training of staff with existing courses does make a difference in knowledge.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2024-07-31
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf application/pdf application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/phcfm.v16i1.4467
 
Source African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine; Vol 16, No 1 (2024); 7 pages 2071-2936 2071-2928
 
Language eng
 
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The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7444 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7445 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7446 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7448 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7449 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/4467/7447
 
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Rights Copyright (c) 2024 Jennie Morgan, Ruth Amoore, Sadiya Z. Patel, Katya Evans, Rene Krause https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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