Utilisation of Individual Competencies in Palliative Care: A Qualitative Interview Study of Healthcare Professionals'...

Palliative care is required for all life-threatening diagnoses, aiming to prevent and reduce patients' experienced total pain, hence improving the quality of life for both patients and their relatives. Providing palliative care at home and facilitating home deaths is challenging. Norwegian authorities recognise insufficient competence among healthcare professionals as a factor within this area.

To elucidate how healthcare professionals experience their utilisation of individual competencies when providing palliative end-of-life care at home.

A qualitative study was performed in the Norwegian home care service. Ten individual semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals were conducted. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, employing a critical realist approach.

Three themes were developed: (1) Being the right person for the job, (2) The patient is more than a diagnosis and (3) Supporting relatives along the journey. Healthcare professionals' individual competencies made them well-suited to provide palliative care, enabled them to recognise patients as unique individuals, and facilitated essential support and empowerment of their relatives.

Important individual competencies among healthcare professionals were personal intuition, compassion, attentiveness, respect, flexibility and open-mindedness. The right healthcare professionals for providing palliative end-of-life care at home must utilise their individual competencies to seamlessly unite the art of caring with the science of palliative medicine. By doing this, healthcare professionals can better fulfil the aims of palliative care and provide high-quality care for patients.