Provision of palliative and end-of-life care in New Zealand residential aged care facilities: general practitioners' perspectives.

This exploratory study examined general practitioners' (GPs) perspectives on delivering end-of-life care in the New Zealand residential aged care context. A general inductive approach to the data collected from semi-structured interviews with 17 GPs from 15 different New Zealand general practices was taken. Findings examine: (1) GPs' life experience; (2) the GP relationship with the facilities and provision of end-of-life care; (3) the GP interaction with families of dying residents; and (4) GP relationship with hospice. The nature of the GP relationship with the facility influenced GP involvement in end-of-life care in aged care facilities, with GPs not always able to direct a facility's end-of-life care decisions for specific residents. GP participation in end-of-life care was constrained by GP time availability and the costs to the facilities for that time. GPs reported seldom using hospice services for residents, but did use the reputation (cachet) associated with hospice practices to provide an authoritative buffer for their end-of-life clinical decisions when talking with families and residents. GP training in end-of-life care, especially for those with dementia, was reported as ad hoc and done through informal mentoring between GPs. This paper is on a topic of increasing policy importance. With the aging of the population, the pressure on our aged care facilities will become intense. This paper highlights how GPs, the main source of clinical supervision in residential aged care, do their job and what the issues are that facilitate and impede their participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]