Talking about palliative and end-of-life care: considering professionals’ emotions

What is it about?

Our paper looks at the role of healthcare professionals’ own emotions when they need to have conversions about palliative and end-of-life care with patients and families. Importantly, we spoke specifically to professionals who have these conversations in their day-to-day jobs, but are not specialists in this area. We found that these professionals must do a lot of ‘emotional labour’ – making sure they show (or don’t show) different emotions in different situations. They do this for the benefit of the patients and families that they work with, and see it as an important part of their communication and relationships with them. However, they also described needing more support to have good conversations with patients and their families about end-of-life issues. This needs to include pro-active support like providing better training around palliative and end-of-life care, but also reactive support – for example, providing opportunities to reflect after a tricky conversation. All of this needs to be accompanied by a supportive workplace culture.

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Why is it important?

What our research found is important because with increasing numbers of people living and dying with advanced disease, people who are not specialists in this area are having to have these conversations more often. We need to make sure that they are supported to do this as well as possible, and hope our work provides some guidance on potential ways of doing this.

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