Technology use and management in palliative care

Research in Australia into the management of innovation in multidisciplinary patient care teams in palliative care organisations is reported with regard to the application and management of technologies. Results of interviews in three palliative care case study organisations are combined with results of data analysis to provide a picture of the management and use of technologies in these organisations. A sometimes ambiguous environment is described, where the technologies acquired and applied to enhance or maintain a patient’s quality of life during the end of life can at the some time provide stressors and uncertainty to the process. In this environment there is at the one time an implicit understanding of the broad view of technology as including a human aspect in application and a view of technology as applied science; as technological “things”. Access to technologies has to be managed along with the application of technologies as the case study organisations do not own some of the sophisticated technologies, for example scanners, that they utilise and so they must schedule and transport patients into a queue at another location. High frequencies of ad hoc communications regarding patients’ situations, required by persistent uncertainty about many aspects of those situations, drive an anthropocentric rather than technocentric view of care provision. This view is supported in the ethos of palliative care, which helps to ensure that “the technology is attached to the patient and not vice-versa”.