Compassionate Person-Centered and Interprofessional Palliative Care: Challenges and Opportunities

Dear Colleagues,

There is a rising focus on compassionate person-centred care (CPCC) and interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) to deliver high-quality palliative care that achieves patient satisfaction, as well as positive patient outcomes. Reflecting the broad scope of care, IPPC teams are typically composed of multiple professionals, including chaplains, nurses, physicians, psychologists, social workers and other health-related professionals. Interprofessional collaboration presents unique challenges that can become barriers to communication, namely professionals’ differing routines, different knowledge and identities, and professional hierarchies and time constraints. Nevertheless, if CPCC is indeed the goal, then the tenets and contributions of each profession must be valued and respected.

There has been a paucity of research specifically in the area focused on interprofessional education and practice in palliative care, the involvement of the patient, the family and care partners on the team, and the impact on the overall outcomes for the individual receiving care. Specific concepts that underpin successful collaboration include the sharing of responsibilities and decision-making, partnerships established on mutual trust, interdependency among providers to reach common goals and shared power among team members. All of these concepts of collaboration are also part of interprofessional core competencies: teamwork, communication, understanding of roles and responsibilities, and values/ethics. 

This Special Issue of Healthcare welcomes original contributions of relevance to this area of research across any setting, cultural background and academic disciplines with the hope of identifying work that will address challenges, opportunities and barriers to IPCP. Multidisciplinary research projects are especially encouraged. Authors are invited to submit research papers (quantitative, qualitative, case-studies or mixed-methods studies), concept analysis papers, quality improvement papers and review papers. We also encourage submissions from countries or regions in which the knowledge dissemination in this field has been scarse (e.g., Southern, Central and Eastern Europe; West and Central Africa; South and Central America, etc.). The listed keywords suggest some of the many other possibilities.

Dr. Carlos Laranjeira
Dr. Ana Querido
Guest Editors

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