Provider Perspectives on Palliative and Complex Care Team Collaboration.

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Healthcare
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration
• Medical Subspecialties

Background:

• Pediatric palliative care and complex care programs serve children with medical complexity (CMC).
• Collaboration between these programs is frequent but poorly documented.
• Programmatic differences exist across institutions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore facilitators and challenges in collaboration between pediatric complex care and palliative care providers.
• To understand provider perspectives on enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Main Methods:

• Semi-structured interviews with 18 providers from 10 academic medical centers.
• Qualitative thematic analysis of transcribed interviews.
• Exploration of perceived collaboration facilitators, challenges, and enhancement strategies.

Main Results:

• Identified individual and institutional facilitators and challenges to collaboration.
• Described optimized collaborative processes.
• Collected provider visions for enhancing future collaboration.

Conclusions:

• Both pediatric palliative care and complex care providers identified similar collaboration facilitators and challenges.
• Greater integration (e.g., embedded programs, shared staff) can mitigate challenges.
• Further research should explore outcomes of integrated models, incorporating patient and family perspectives.