Towards timely integration of specialist palliative home care services for older people with dementia with complex care needs and their family carers: a mixed-method theory-informed study

10-2022 to 09-2025

A growing number of older people with dementia live at home, have unmet complex care needs, and are often cared for by their family. These people could benefit from receiving specialist palliative home care services. Yet, their access to these services remains poor and late, and this problem remains understudied. Hence, our overarching aim is to provide the first comprehensive understanding of how specialist palliative home care services can be integrated timely for older people with dementia with complex care needs and their family carers. We will investigate their current use of these services using the administrative data of 98.8% of the Belgian population. We will also identify micro-, meso- and macro-level facilitators and barriers that affect the actions and interactions of specialist palliative home care teams to timely deliver their services in dementia through a systematic integrative review and a qualitative study with stakeholders, informed by Extended Normalization Process Theory. Finally, we will develop a Logic Model by triangulating these mixed-method data via iterative stakeholder and expert consultations. By doing this, we will gain insight into the gaps in the current use of these services, the barriers that need to be addressed and how we can address them to timely integrate specialist palliative home care services in dementia. This knowledge can help us develop a new practice that will improve the access to these services of this somewhat neglected group. 

Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (FWO). FWO junior post-doctoral fellowship project with grant no. 12D4523N