Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often live with unmet palliative needs and low quality of life, although several guidelines recommend that those with COPD should be offered early and integrated palliative care. However, none of the guidelines describe how these recommendations can be operationalised and the current literature offers little information about experiences with developing and implementing new palliative care services. This article offers insight into the experience of developing and implementing a new palliative outpatient structure for patients with severe COPD. All patients are assigned to a nurse who has overall responsibility for establishing and maintaining an individualised relationship with the patient and identifying their needs for care and treatment. Routine outpatient visits are replaced by ad hoc consultations, and patients are seen by pulmonary specialists only when there is a need for medical assessment and treatment or a planned advanced care planning dialogue. The new service was succesfully implemented; however, the changes required good multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated health professionals and managerial support. This paper highlights the need for further studies to investigate the effectiveness of new palliative care interventions for patients with COPD.
Background
Little is known of how to organize non-malign palliative care, and existing knowledge show that patients with COPD live with unmet palliative needs and low quality of life. With the intent to improve palliative care for patients with COPD, we changed the structure of our outpatient clinic from routine visits by a pulmonary specialist to a structure where each patient was assigned a nurse, offered annual advance care planning dialogues, and ad hoc pulmonary specialist visits. The aim of this study was to explore COPD patients’ experiences with a new and altered palliative organization.
Methods
The design was interpretive description as described by Thorne. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with patients with severe COPD from January 2017 to December 2017.
Results
Patients described how the professional relationship and the availability of their nurse was considered as the most important and positive change. It made the patients feel safe, in control, and subsequently influenced their ability to self-manage their life and prevent being hospitalized. The patients did not emphasize the advanced care planning dialogues as something special or troublesome.
Conclusion
We showed that it is relevant and meaningful to establish a structure that supports professional relationships between patient, nurse and physician based on patients needs. The new way of structuring the outpatient care was highly appreciated by COPD patients and made them feel safe which brought confidence in self-management abilities.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1186/s12904-019-0410-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Background: Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and it contributes to the development of many other serious diseases. Smoking cessation in COPD patients is known to improve survival and reduce the number of hospitalization-requiring acute exacerbations of COPD. However, smoking cessation interventions in these patients have only been successful for approximately 15-20% for consistent smoking abstinence in 12 months. Thus, more effective interventions are needed for this patient group. The aim of this study is to determine whether a high-intensity intervention compared to a low-intensity intervention can increase the proportion of persistent (> 12 months) anamnestic and biochemical smoking cessation in active smokers with COPD. Methods: This study is a randomized controlled trial. A total of 600 active smokers with COPD will be randomly assigned 1:1 to either a standard treatment (guideline-based municipal smoking cessation program, "low intensity" group) or an intervention ("high-intensity" group) group, which consists of group sessions, telephone consultations, behavior design, hotline, and "buddy-matching" (smoker matched with COPD patient who has ceased smoking). Both groups will receive pharmacological smoking cessation. The primary endpoint is anamnestic and biochemical (cotinine analysis in urine) validated smoking cessation after 12 months.
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