Table 1.
Participant characteristics
| Clinical experts | Experts with financial and politicy focus | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Participant characteristics (n = 42) | total | Physician | Nurse | Social Worker | total | Financial focus | Political focus | Healthcare systems researchers |
| n = 27 | n = 16 | n = 10 | n = 1 | n = 15 | n = 8 | n = 5 | n = 2 | |
| Gender | ||||||||
| Male | 13 | 7 | 6 | 11 | 6 | 3 | 2 | |
| Female | 14 | 9 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | |
| Actual work setting (multiple count) | ||||||||
| Palliative care hospital unit | 11 | 7 | 4 | 10 | 6 | 4 | ||
| General care hospital unit | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 3 | |||
| Hospital support team | 6 | 5 | 1 | 7 | 4 | 3 | ||
| Specialized palliative home care | 10 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 7 | 3 | 4 | |
| General palliative home care | 5 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 4 | |||
| Hospice | 4 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 3 | ||
| Experience (median, range) | ||||||||
| Years of palliative care experience | 15, 3–30 | 20, 10–30 | 14, 3–25 | 15 | 10.5, 1–14 | 7.5, 1–30 | 11, 10–27 | 10, n/a |
| University affiliation | ||||||||
| Yes | 5 | 3 | 2 | Not applicable | ||||
| No | 22 | 13 | 8 | 1 | ||||
| Area | ||||||||
| urban | 22 | 12 | 9 | 1 | Not applicable | |||
| rural | 5 | 4 | 1 | |||||
| Geographical region | ||||||||
| North | 4 | 3 | 1 | |||||
| East | 4 | 2 | 2 | |||||
| South | 13 | 9 | 4 | 5 | 5 | |||
| West | 6 | 2 | 4 | |||||
| national | 10 | 3 | 5 | 2 | ||||
Notes Table 1: Some participants were working in multiple care settings, e.g. a specialized palliative home care physician also working in a hospice. The social worker and one nurse were coordinators working at the interface of general and specialized care. One healthcare systems researcher wasn’t able to make an adequate guess in the working-experience with palliative care – the topic was not taken on at a specific point in time but was part of the overall research on healthcare systems