Interview Schedule for InGAP project (geriatrics and palliative care interdisciplinary working)

This file is the interview schedule from the InGAP study.

Full project title: Practices, Issues and Possibilities at the Interface between Geriatrics and Palliative care: An Exploratory Study

Purpose of research: Scoping qualitative study about current working practices and experiences of care at the interface of elderly medicine and palliative care within a specific hospital.

Aims: (1) To understand current inter-disciplinary working practices at the interface between the specialities of geriatric medicine and palliative care in the context of end of life care (i.e. patient’s last year of life), and explore how these are evolving. (2) To identify issues that affect professional and patient experiences of end of life care (within the last year of the patient’s life). (3) To identify practices that enhance care and practices that appear not to do so, such as duplication between specialities and areas neither cover.

Objectives:

Primary objective: Develop an analysis of working practices, staff and patient experiences where both geriatricians and palliative care specialists are involved in providing care for older patients who may be in their last year of life, with a view to understanding how the system of care is evolving and the tensions within it that require attention.

Secondary objectives: (1) Understand how current working practices influence collaboration and/or potential overlap or gaps in care provision. (2) Document patient (or those close to them, i.e. carer or family) experiences of care and understanding of the services and how this might be improved using insights from the analysis of working practices between the two specialities.

Ethics Approvals: The study and protocol were reviewed and received favourable ethical opinions from university and HRA ethics boards (HREC/2755/Holti and IRAS 229254 respectively).

Chief Investigator: Prof Richard Holti (The Open University). Co-Investigator: Dr Erica Borgstrom (The Open University)

Time period of the data collection: The study was conducted during 2017 and 2018.

Interview type: semi-structured qualitative interviews.

Participants: The interview schedule shows two different categories of participants. One is professionals (either working in the Older Persons Unit or in the palliative care team). The second category is for patients and/or carers/family under the care of these teams on an Older Person Unit.

Participants provided written informed consent to partake in the study and to have their interview recorded, transcribed, and anonymised and for anonymised quotes to be used in research communications. Due to the nature of the study (identifiable location and professional roles), to protect participant confidentiality, raw data cannot be made accessible through any data repository; the participant information sheet informed people that ‘all recordings and verbatim transcriptions will be held as confidential to the OU research team.’ Hence, participants were not consented for their data to be made publicly available; exemplar longer anonymised quotes for data verification are available via request to the corresponding author. As per the data management plan, transcripts will be held until 2028.