“Never waste a good crisis”: A qualitative study of the impact of COVID-19 on palliative care in seven hospitals using the Dynamic Sustainability Framework

Abstract

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic led to rapid adaptations among palliative care services, but it is unclear how these adaptations vary in relation to their unique organizational contexts.

Aim:

Understand how the pandemic impacted the implementation of new and existing palliative care programs in diverse hospital systems using the Dynamic Sustainability Framework.

Design:

Twelve in-depth interviews with 15 key informants representing palliative care programs from seven hospital systems between April and June 2020.

Setting:

Public, not-for-profit private, community, and academic teaching hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area with existing palliative care programs that were expanding services to new clinical areas (e.g. new outpatient clinic or community-based care).

Results:

Six themes characterized how palliative care programs were impacted and adapted during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic: palliative care involvement in preparing for surge, increased emphasis on advance care planning, advocating for visitors for dying patients, providing emotional support to clinicians, adopting virtual approaches to care, and gaps in chaplaincy support. There was variation in how new and existing programs were able to adapt to early pandemic stresses; systems with new outpatient programs struggled to utilize their programs effectively during the crisis onset.

Conclusions:

The fit between palliative care programs and practice setting was critical to program resiliency during the early stages of the pandemic. Reconceptualizing the Dynamic Sustainability Framework to reflect a bidirectional relationship between ecological system, practice setting, and intervention levels might better guide implementers and researchers in understanding how ecological/macro changes can influence interventions on the ground.