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General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: General Practitioners (GPs) are well-positioned to provide grief support to patients. Most GPs view the provision of bereavement care as an important aspect of their role and the GP is the health professional that many people turn to when they need support. We aimed to explore GPs’ under...

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Autores principales: O’Connor, Moira, Breen, Lauren J
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3986890/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24670040
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-59
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author O’Connor, Moira
Breen, Lauren J
author_facet O’Connor, Moira
Breen, Lauren J
author_sort O’Connor, Moira
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: General Practitioners (GPs) are well-positioned to provide grief support to patients. Most GPs view the provision of bereavement care as an important aspect of their role and the GP is the health professional that many people turn to when they need support. We aimed to explore GPs’ understandings of bereavement care and their education and professional development needs in relation to bereavement care. METHODS: An in-depth qualitative design was adopted using a social constructionist approach as our aims were exploratory and applied. Nineteen GPs (12 women and 7 men) living in Western Australia were interviewed; 14 were based in metropolitan Perth and 5 in rural areas. GPs were invited, via a letter, to participate in a semi-structured interview. The interviews occurred within each GP’s workplace or, for the rural GPs, via telephone, and all interviews were digitally audio-recorded and transcribed. RESULTS: Analysis was based upon constant comparison and began as soon as possible after each interview. The data revealed four tensions or opposing views concerning bereavement and bereavement care. These were (1) whether grief is a standardised versus an individual process, (2) the role of the GP in intervening versus promoting resilience, (3) the GP as a broker of services versus a service provider, and (4) the need for formal education and professional development versus ‘on-the-job’ experiential learning. CONCLUSIONS: GPs have a critical role in exploring distress, including grief. However, changes need to be made to ensure GPs have up-to-date knowledge of contemporary theories and approaches. GPs urgently need education both at the undergraduate and postgraduate degree levels, and in continuing professional development. Otherwise GPs will rely on out-dated theories and constructions of grief, which may be detrimental to patient care.
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spelling pubmed-39868902014-04-16 General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study O’Connor, Moira Breen, Lauren J BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: General Practitioners (GPs) are well-positioned to provide grief support to patients. Most GPs view the provision of bereavement care as an important aspect of their role and the GP is the health professional that many people turn to when they need support. We aimed to explore GPs’ understandings of bereavement care and their education and professional development needs in relation to bereavement care. METHODS: An in-depth qualitative design was adopted using a social constructionist approach as our aims were exploratory and applied. Nineteen GPs (12 women and 7 men) living in Western Australia were interviewed; 14 were based in metropolitan Perth and 5 in rural areas. GPs were invited, via a letter, to participate in a semi-structured interview. The interviews occurred within each GP’s workplace or, for the rural GPs, via telephone, and all interviews were digitally audio-recorded and transcribed. RESULTS: Analysis was based upon constant comparison and began as soon as possible after each interview. The data revealed four tensions or opposing views concerning bereavement and bereavement care. These were (1) whether grief is a standardised versus an individual process, (2) the role of the GP in intervening versus promoting resilience, (3) the GP as a broker of services versus a service provider, and (4) the need for formal education and professional development versus ‘on-the-job’ experiential learning. CONCLUSIONS: GPs have a critical role in exploring distress, including grief. However, changes need to be made to ensure GPs have up-to-date knowledge of contemporary theories and approaches. GPs urgently need education both at the undergraduate and postgraduate degree levels, and in continuing professional development. Otherwise GPs will rely on out-dated theories and constructions of grief, which may be detrimental to patient care. BioMed Central 2014-03-27 /pmc/articles/PMC3986890/ /pubmed/24670040 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-59 Text en Copyright © 2014 O’Connor and Breen; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
O’Connor, Moira
Breen, Lauren J
General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title_full General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title_fullStr General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title_full_unstemmed General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title_short General Practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
title_sort general practitioners’ experiences of bereavement care and their educational support needs: a qualitative study
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3986890/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24670040
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-59
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