Facilitating day-to-day decision making in palliative care

As part of a larger grounded theory study investigating the process by which palliative care patients make everyday choices, a secondary analysis of data was conducted to investigate the ways nurses support or restrict patients' participation in their care. Constant comparative methods were used to generate a detailed, contextually grounded description of nurses' strategies that influenced patients' participation in making everyday choices about their personal and nursing care. Data consisted of field notes derived from observations of patients and their caregivers in two hospital-based palliative core units and from 23 transcripts of interviews with participating nurses and patients. Nurses' efforts to support patients' participation in decision making were described as a four-phase process: getting to know the patient, enhancing opportunities for choice, being open to patient choice, and respecting choice. Factors influencing nurses' use of supportive behaviors and behaviors that restricted patients' participation in everyday choices were identified. Given the importance patients attributed to making choices, these findings provide a foundation for the design of nursing interventions that hold great potential for directly influencing quality of life.