Relatives’ views of health care in the last year of life

Abstract

This article reports the views of 155 relatives of patients who died during a 12-month period with varying degrees of palliative care service (hospital-based, home care and no palliative care). Although overall care was rated as excellent or good by the majority of interviewees, the Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954) was used to gather examples of good and poor care from relatives' perspectives. These incidents are recounted here under a framework describing the process of care from access to services through to care at the time of death and aftercare for relatives. The range of incidents reported suggest that relatives consider all aspects of care - technical and interpersonal - as important towards the end of life, but particular importance is placed on the attitudinal and dignity-preserving aspects of care. The movement to integrate principles of palliative care into all clinical practice is reinforced by the findings from this study.