Optimization of Methods Verifying Volunteers’ Ability to Provide Hospice Care

Abstract

The subject of the presented work was an attempt at optimization of the methods used for verification of the candidates for medical voluntary workers in a hospice and decreasing the danger of a negative influence of an incompetent volunteer on a person in a terminal stage of a disease and his or her relatives. The study was carried out in St. Lazarus Hospice in Krakow, Poland, and included 154 adult participants in four consecutive editions of “A course for volunteers – a guardian of the sick” organized by the hospice. In order to improve the recruitment of these workers, the hitherto methods of selection (an interview with the coordinator of volunteering and no less than 50% of attendance in classes of a preparatory course for volunteers”) were expanded by additional instruments—the tests whose usefulness was examined in practice. Knowledge of candidates was tested with the use of a written examination which consisted of four open questions and an MCQ test comprising 31 questions. Practical abilities were checked by the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). A reference point for the results of these tests was a hidden standardized long-term observation carried out during the subsequent work of the volunteers in the stationary ward in the hospice using the Amsterdam Attitude and Communication Scale (AACS). Among the tests used, the greatest value (confirmed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis) in predicting how a given person would cope with practical tasks and in contact with the sick and their relatives had a practical test of the OSCE type.

Effectiveness of a Holistic Capacity-Building Program for Volunteers in Community-Based End-of-Life Care

“…By contrast, people recently bereaved, overly zealous in their religious views, overly wordy, or lacking social support are discouraged from becoming involved in delivering EoLC (Claxton-Oldfield & Banzen, 2010). Despite those accumulated findings, reviews have also shown that no standardized criteria for EoLC volunteer screening have been developed nor has any instrument to effectively select applicants with qualities desired for providing EoLC (Pesut et al, 2014; Szeliga & Mirecka, 2018).…”

“…For those reasons, volunteers in providing EoLC should have clear communication skills involving active empathetic listening (Worthington, 2008) and a heightened awareness of setting reasonable boundaries between patients and volunteers and taking good care of themselves during service (Claxton-Oldfield et al, 2011; Soderhamn et al, 2017). However, despite the range of programs for volunteers in EoLC implemented in hospices/hospitals (e.g., Szeliga & Mirecka, 2018), little consensus has been achieved on the context-specific capacities required by volunteers in delivering EoLC in community settings, and even less is known about how to best train selected individuals to effectively provide community-based EoLC services (S. M. Morris et al, 2017).…”