Improving Out-of-Hours care for people with serious illness (v1)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Supporting people with palliative and end-of-life care needs "out of hours": a mixed-methods study of needs, demand and experiences to inform person-centred service developments
IRAS ID
227648
Contact name
Scott A Murray
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 29 days
Research summary
It can be difficult to know what to do if something goes wrong “out of hours” when the GP surgery is closed. This is especially true for people who have life-limiting illnesses or who are frail. Research shows the biggest thing that can help people live safely and confidently at home is good quality care and support round the clock, every day of the year: “24/7” care.
Out-of-Hours services (OOH) face huge challenges and are about to be changed significantly across Scotland. At the moment, we don’t have much of an idea about how people decide what to do when a crisis happens. If we change services without having a good understanding of what happens now then we may miss important information about how best to improve them. So we plan to examine the Scottish OOH service as it currently operates and explore how OOH services are understood by the service users with palliative and end of life care needs to inform redesign of health and social care delivery OOH.
We will do this in two main ways.
Firstly we will gather information from national Scottish datasets about people who died at any time in 2016 to understand what OOH services they used during their last 12 months.
Secondly we will hold focus groups and face-to-face interviews with people who have a serious illness and have used OOH services to learn from their experiences. We will do the same with people who cared for a loved one before they died.
We will combine the findings in order to present the Scottish NHS with high quality evidence about how people actually use OOH services and what we can learn from that to improve the services.
REC name
South East Scotland REC 02
REC reference
17/SS/0127
Date of REC Opinion
15 Sep 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion