Planning future care during Covid-19
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Adapting person-centred advance care planning and communication across health and social care systems during Covid-19: A qualitative study exploring patient, family, and practitioner experiences.
IRAS ID
303445
Contact name
Joanne Bayly
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
St Barnabas Hospices
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 3 months, 1 days
Research summary
In this study, we will explore Advance Care Planning (ACP) for people living at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
ACP describes healthcare processes that support people express and document preferences for treatment and care as their illness progresses and their condition deteriorates. It includes helping them identify someone to make decisions on their behalf for scenarios when they are not able to make decisions for themselves. It is an active ongoing process and preferences may change. Research has found that ACP may improve satisfaction with care, use of health services, and documentation of care preferences.
Initiating ACP conversations during the Covid-19 pandemic presented challenges for patients, professionals, and health care systems. The risk of contracting Covid-19 increased uncertainty for people already living with unpredictable disease.
Because of the rapidly evolving situation, a COVID-19 specific ACP intervention was introduced in March 2020. All medically stable people, known to, but not currently receiving active care from a hospice community team were contacted, mostly by telephone. People were able to discuss risks relating to their personal circumstances and state preferences for care should they deteriorate or contract Covid-19. Preferences could then be documented and shared with other community services providing care (GPs, community nurses and ambulance teams) via a 24 hour/seven days per week coordination and delivery telephone hub staffed by trained nurse assessors (the ECHO hub).
Individual and group interviews will explore experiences of people delivering and receiving the Covid-19 ACP intervention, and the ECHO hub nurses, primary care clinicians and ambulance clinicians using the documented advance care plans during episodes of care. We want to understand how innovations and adaptation to ACP supported people to express and achieve preferences for care during the pandemic and how this information was communicated across services to sustain beneficial innovations during and after the pandemic.REC name
South West - Cornwall & Plymouth Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/SW/0001
Date of REC Opinion
25 Jan 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion