Considerations for Fostering Palliative Care Awareness in Developing Contexts: Strategies From Locally Initiated Projects in India.

Context: Lack of palliative care (PC) awareness is a barrier to its utilization in developing contexts.

Objectives: To identify and understand strategies that changed awareness of the concepts and value of palliative care in a multi-site quality improvement project in India.

Methods: The Palliative Care - Promoting Assessment and Improvement of the Cancer Experience (PC-PAICE) evaluation team conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with clinician and organization stakeholders at seven geographically dispersed sites. We used inductive and deductive approaches in this secondary analysis to identify emerging themes.

Results: We identified the following strategies to improve awareness of concepts and value of palliative care. Strategy 1: Educate medical trainees, staff, and the community about palliative care and its concepts. Sub-strategies: Participate in community events. Integrate PC concepts into early medical education. Standardize training for practitioners. Strategy 2: Design and disseminate India-specific research to reinforce awareness of the value of palliative care. Sub-strategies: Publish and use India-specific palliative care research. Strategy 3: Facilitate communication between providers and departments to improve awareness of palliative care services and its concepts. Sub-strategies: Create referral frameworks and network with providers referring to palliative care to change awareness of available services and palliative care concepts.

Conclusion: To increase palliative care utilization, program development can include community and provider-focused efforts on awareness of the concepts and value of palliative care. These three strategies held salience across sites representing diverse Indian geographic and cultural settings; as such, they may be applicable to other contexts.