Primary care palliative and supportive care services: Experiences and perceptions of patients with advanced progressive disease and their informal carers

Palliative care can be defined as the active, holistic care of patients with advanced progressive illness, and incorporates symptom management with psychological, social and spiri-tual care (WHO, 1990). Palliative care is for patients in the advanced stages of illness.
Supportive care follows people throughout the process of their disease, from pre-diagnosis, treatment, cure, continuing illness, death and into bereavement. The aim of supportive care is to maximise benefits of treatment and help people to live as well as possible with a disease (NCHSPCS, 2002).
The majority of palliative/supportive care is delivered in pri-mary care, and up to 90% of people spend most of their last year of life at home (Aoun et al, 2005).
Palliative services were initially only available for cancer suf-ferers, however recent policy proclaims that palliative and supportive care services should be available to all, regard-less of diagnosis (DoH, 2008) and a plethora of services now exist to meet these needs.
This research will take a interpretive phenomenological meth-odology to explore the experience of receiving these services from the perspectives of patients and their informal carers,