Contending with advanced illness: patient and caregiver perspectives

Despite improvements in end-of-life care, some unrelieved suffering persists for patients with advanced illness and their family members. Hospice and palliative care services can reduce suffering, but these services remain under-used.

To investigate how patients with advanced illness and their primary caregivers experienced and responded to health care needs and decision making and how some dyads moved toward comfort-focused care.

This was a qualitative study using the grounded theory method for sample selection, data collection, and analysis. Dyadic semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis. Twenty-two participants, 12 patients and 10 family surrogates, provided 16 interviews for this study.

Participants engaged in a process of contending with advanced illness. The major phases comprising this process were suffering, struggling, and settling. Struggling included enduring the experience and fighting the illness. During the phase of settling, the focus shifted away from curative efforts and toward supportive care. Conditions that facilitated the movement into this phase included receiving clear and consistent information about the patient's health status, trusting health care providers, having attended to advance care planning in some form, and being aware of and able to acknowledge the terminal nature of the illness.

Findings from this pilot study offer a preliminary theoretical model to enhance the understanding of patient and family caregiver needs during advanced illness. Awareness of their perspective can inform the timing and content of clinicians' communication and interventions.