Les avatars des soins palliatifs désenclavés. Enquête en unités de soins palliatifs, en équipes mobiles et en services de soins curatifs

Volunteering in Palliative Care in France: “A Tough Job”; Patient, Family, Caregiver, and Volunteer Perspectives

“…The interviews (face-to-face and recorded) were all fully transcribed and then analyzed using a grid created a posteriori using an inductive approach. While our initial research question broadly addressed the work of palliative care teams [48], we observed a high degree of diversity in comments made by different persons concerning volunteering, which led us to consider a posteriori this activity as an important dimension for an understanding of palliative care. We, therefore, extracted all references to volunteer service from the general body of interviews to study them separately using content analysis, that is, by the systematic and methodical examination of each interview.…”

“…The narratives studied show that there are strong differences in the perception-and therefore in the acceptance-of the presence of volunteers, depending on whether the caregivers work in a palliative or in curative care setting. This is a reflection of two dominant and opposing conceptions of care: one palliative, endowed primarily with human resources and centered on relieving symptoms; the other curative, sometimes very technical and focused on cure [48]. In the first case, volunteers are often considered full members of the care team; in the second case, they are sometimes mistrusted by caregivers, even though the two positions-somewhat overstated here-need to be tempered depending on the sites and people interviewed, as we noted above.…”

“…Some authors also mention the risk of a lack of continuity of volunteer presence in acute care services, and the necessity for their associations to "invent new functions", even if it is necessary to "reassess our goals" [46]. Conversely, some volunteers, better integrated into the facilities, mention with regret their inability to get the PCST involved with patients who they think are in need, as these cross-disciplinary teams encounter the same obstacles to intervening as they themselves do [48].…”