What does it take to deliver brilliant home-based palliative care? Using positive organisational scholarship and video reflexive ethnography to explore the complexities of palliative care at home

Background: Despite the increasing number of people requiring palliative care at home, there is limited evidence on how home-based palliative care is best practised.

Aim: The aim of this participatory qualitative study is to determine the characteristics that contribute to brilliant home-based palliative care.

Design: This study was inspired by the brilliance project – an initiative to explore how positive organisational scholarship in healthcare can be used to study brilliant health service management from the viewpoint of patients, families, and clinicians. The methodology of positive organisational scholarship in healthcare was combined with video-reflexive ethnography.

Setting/participants: Home-based specialist palliative care services across two Australian states participated in the study. Clinicians were able to take part in the study at different levels. Pending their preference, this could involve video-recording of palliative care, facilitating and/or participating in reflexive sessions to analyse and critique the recordings, identifying the characteristics that contribute to brilliant home-based palliative care, and/or sharing the findings with others.

Results: Brilliance in home-based palliative care is contingent on context and is conceptualised as a variety of actions, people, and processes. Care is more likely to be framed as brilliant when it is epitomised: anticipatory aptitude and action; a weave of commitment; flexible adaptability; and/or team capacity-building.

Conclusion: This study is important because it verifies the characteristics of brilliant home-based palliative care. Furthermore, these characteristics can be adapted for use within other services.