‘Do I actually even need all these tablets?’ A qualitative study exploring deprescribing decision-making for people in receipt of palliative care and their family members

Background: For people in receipt of palliative care, where polypharmacy is common and medication burden is high, there remains limited knowledge around the decision-making processes that underpin deprescribing; for example, recent deprescribing studies have focused on wider issues of identifying polypharmacy in palliative care contexts. However, little is known about the specific challenges of, and preferences towards, decision-making to support the deprescribing for people in receipt of palliative care.

Aim: To explore decision-making processes that underpin deprescribing approaches, based on the experiences of people in receipt of palliative care, and their family member(s).

Design: An explorative qualitative study involving in-person semi-structured interviews, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Setting/participants: Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with people in receipt of palliative care (n = 25), where 12 of these interviews were undertaken as dyads, with both the patient and a family member together. Interviews were undertaken across a range of settings, spanning: hospice outpatient day units (n = 11), hospice inpatient wards (n = 4), care home (n = 1) and patients’ own homes (n = 9), and involved people with diverse diagnoses (including: cancer 52%, heart failure 20%, motor neurone disease 12%, pulmonary fibrosis 4% and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 4%).

Results: Two overarching themes were developed – the first reflected the need to address patient understanding by ‘laying the foundations of deprescribing decision-making’. The second theme, ‘having a voice in deprescribing decision-making’, reflected desires to (pro)-actively involve patients and their family member(s) within these processes.

Conclusion: There is a need to take a balanced, person-centred and shared approach to deprescribing decision-making for people receiving palliative care. Co-design strategies offer one approach to further explore this.