Applying the Pictor technique to research interviews with people affected by advanced disease.

Aim: To outline some of the challenges facing people affected by advanced disease who want to participate in research interviews, and to present Pictor, a method that can help manage some of these challenges.

Background: Patients and lay-carers may have many issues that affect their ability to participate in qualitative research interviews. These issues can include the physical effects of disease, its treatments and emotional distress.

Community palliative care: role perception.

Community nurses play a key part in palliative care for patients and their families, yet there is relatively little research examining how their role is understood by nurses themselves. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study exploring how district nursing teams and community matrons (CMs) understood their own and each other's roles in palliative care. Twenty-four district nurses (DNs), 15 CMs and seven other key stakeholders were interviewed.

Interprofessional relationships and collaborative working: encouraging reflective practice.

A challenge for those involved in the education and professional development of health and social care practitioners is to find ways of encouraging and enabling them to critically reflect upon complex collaborative situations and consider how they might improve interprofessional relationships. To meet this challenge, we piloted and developed a reflective exercise derived from methods used in personal construct psychology (Hargreaves,1979; Salmon,1994), which has proved to be useful in three overlapping areas; research, professional development, and classroom teaching. To illustrate the technique, this paper presents a case study of one district nurse who used the method to help her examine complex interprofessional relationships when providing long-term community care.