Families in palliative care: exploring family and health-care professionals’ beliefs

At the terminal stage of a disease, health professionals are encouraged to extend the scope of their interventions to include the family. However, clinicians often feel powerless when confronted with the suffering that family members experience. According to Wright, suffering is intimately related to family beliefs. These beliefs suffuse their experience of the illness and determine their understanding of the disease, the choice of treatment and compliance with a programme of care. Moreover, clinicians' own beliefs affect their sense of control over the patient and his or her family's suffering. This article suggests interventions that target families' and clinicians' beliefs and attempt to ease the dying process in a context of palliative care. These interventions consist of: acknowledging and challenging health-care professionals' own beliefs; exploring and challenging constraining beliefs of the patient and the family; and supporting beliefs that offer hope. These interventions can empower health professionals and families in their efforts to alleviate suffering related to the terminal phase of an illness.