Facilitators and Barriers to Care in Rural Emergency Departments in Alberta for Patients on Peritoneal Dialysis (PD): An Interpretive Descriptive Study

BACKGROUND: Home dialysis offers many advantages to patients, but they require support to manage a home-based therapy such as peritoneal dialysis (PD). A rural emergency department provides an important safety net for patients requiring medical care, including managing complications of PD, such as peritonitis. Patients living in northern Alberta are spread out geographically and can be far from a PD training center, yet anecdotally, many rural sites do not provide care for these patients. OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to identify the facilitators and barriers to nursing care in rural emergency departments in northern Alberta for patients receiving PD. DESIGN: A qualitative interpretive descriptive approach was used. SETTING: Rural emergency departments across northern Alberta. PARTICIPANTS: Purposeful sampling was used to seek participants from 1 of 4 rural acute care hospital emergency departments in northern Alberta. Six registered nurses and 1 licensed practical nurse agreed to participate in the study. They ranged in experience from 2 to 18 years. Two of the participants were unit managers, 2 were clinical nurse educators (CNEs), and the other 3 were staff nurses with 1 of them in a leadership position. METHODS: Individual semistructured interview were conducted over the telephone. The interview guide was developed based on a review of the literature. Interviews continued until no new information was obtained, that is, data were saturated. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Field notes were recorded. A constant comparative approach was used for analysis. The coding process was both deductive (drawing from the literature) and inductive. RESULTS: Seven participants were interviewed, and there were 4 main themes and 1 subtheme that emerged from the analysis: education (along with the subtheme of resources) was seen as both facilitators and barriers; patient/family ability to perform PD; infrequent exposure; and physician supports. Continuing education about PD was a facilitator, and the lack of education was a barrier to provision of PD care. Similarly, availability of resource materials about PD and access to a CNE were facilitators, while lack of these resources was a barrier to offering PD care. As PD was not always seen regularly, infrequent exposure was a barrier to offering PD care. Lack of physician supports, both from the locum physicians who were sometimes reluctant to care for these patients and the delays in reaching nephrologists were barriers. LIMITATIONS: The findings represent the perceptions of the emergency department nurses who participated. These perceptions may differ from those of nurses who work in other regions of the country. Furthermore, most participants were in a leadership role, and it may be that their perspectives differ from those of front-line nurses. CONCLUSIONS: The findings from our study highlight the need for availability of education and resource materials/persons to care for these patients. There is also a need for greater physician support from both local physicians as well as nephrologists to offer high-quality PD care. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Not applicable. This study is not a clinical trial. It did not involve prospective assignment of participants to a treatment group.