Aysegul Ozturk Birge
Ankara University Faculty of Nursing, Turkey
Title: Doctors and nurses opinions on palliative care in the emergency department: Example of a university hospital in turkey
Biography
Biography: Aysegul Ozturk Birge
Abstract
The study is a descriptive preliminary study. It was aimed to determine the opinions of doctors and nurses about palliative care in the Emergency Department (ED). The data of the study were collected with the participation of 13 doctors from 14 nurses working in the ED of a university hospital between the dates of 1-30 November 2018.
The mean age of the participants was 31.77+ 7.94. All of the participants stated that the patients who had palliative care need were followed up in the ED and the patients who had the most frequent cancer, end stage respiratory failure and advanced stage dementia diagnoses applied to the ED. Reasons for referring patients to the ED; the most frequent pain (48.1%), general condition disorder (25.9%) and nutritional problem (22.2%). 96.3% of the doctors and nurses stated that palliative care should not be given in ED and 70.4% did not provide effective palliative care. The most common difficulty encountered by nurses in providing palliative care was communication (85.7%), feeding difficulty (57.1%), pain (35.7%); the doctors stated that they had feeding difficulty (92.3%), communication (53.8%), delirium (38.8%) management. Factors that prevent the provision of palliative care in the ED according to doctors and nurses; the excess of the workload of health workers (92.6%), inadequate ED environment (88.9%), lack of 7/24 hours of consultation for palliative care (55.6%), and inability to provide psychosocial support (51.9 %).
Preliminary findings of study are recommended to generalize to the population after being applied to the larger sample group.