Synopses of a selection of recently published research articles of relevance to palliative care: Ten minutes to midnight: a narrative inquiry of people living with dying with advanced COPD and their family members

摘要

Palliative care for people with non-malignant disease, such as advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), presents particular challenges to practitioners. These include unpredictable prognosis characterised by multiple exacerbations, and severe symptom burdens. People with COPD often do not receive adequate access to palliative care services, and there are important opportunities to improve care for this population and for their families. This requires that we better understand the experience and needs of people with COPD and their families as they approach the end of life. This paper forms part of a larger study in Canada examining the experiences of people with advanced chronic illness as they approach the end of life. This particular paper reports on those participants who had COPD, exploring people's experiences of living with uncertainty. Narrative inquiry was used in order to describe the ways in which multiple cultural and social discourses shape individual experiences of illness. Purposive recruitment was used, with participants identified via a respiratory therapist from a home oxygen therapy programme. A total of 16 participants, and seven family members, were interviewed three times. The purpose of having multiple interviews was to include family members at two of them, and to explore emerging storylines and narratives in greater depth. The subsequent interviews did not add new findings, but did provide greater depth to some of the themes identified.