How next of kin experience palliative care of relatives at home.

Abstract

Primary health care teams are the teams responsible nowadays in Sweden for the greater part of the home health care system, providing palliative care in the patient's home. If palliative care in the home is to be ethically defensible, it should be voluntary from the point of view of the next of kin and should be designed in such a way that he or she receives different forms of support during the care period. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of palliative care in the home as experienced by the next of kin. The data consist of transcripts from interviews with the next of kin. Giorgi's phenomenological method was selected as the method/analysis for this study, because it focuses on uncovering the meaning of experiences of the participants by studying descriptions from their perspective. A feeling of insufficiency is the phenomenon, which permeates all the five themes: adjustment, awareness, being perceived as a person, emotional effects and feelings of uncertainty. Because the informal carer/next of kin is a significant contributor to palliative care in the home, it is important to promote feelings of control and also self-efficacy.