The inclusion of volunteers to the Team in the care of the patient and the family is
continually increasing. The requests for volunteers by the Medical Care Teams have been
increasing year after year by 5%, reaching about 75 requests received in 2019. 85% of these
requests are assigned a volunteer and the 15% who are not assigned is because the volunteer
does not have the required profile which responds to the patient's needs. These statistics
show, on the one hand, the important and irreplaceable work that volunteers offer in social
support to the patient and this is perceived both by the patient and their family who decide
to have it, and also by the Care Team that is aware of the benefits of "non-professional"
care, which also humanises palliative care. On the other hand, the volunteer is increasingly
present in our society and this is positive, so that more people offer their collaboration
and this in turn "normalises" their role in palliative care.
Although volunteers contribute millions of hours of work, the review of bibliography found no
sufficiently robust studies to merit inclusion, and even less when associating PC
volunteering and NT. As more research is needed on the impact of training and support for
palliative care volunteers, this study intends to study the state of art of technophilia and
technophobia among patients, relatives, volunteers and healthcare professionals in PC, and
according to the results, implement and evaluate a volunteer training programme in the use of
new technology to support patients dying at home and their relatives.
The best approach to evaluate the implementation process of complex intervention is the
combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Basic quantitative measures of
implementation may be combined with in-depth qualitative data to provide detailed
understandings of intervention functioning on a small scale. Use quantitative methods to
measure key process variables and allow testing of pre-hypothesised mechanisms of impact and
contextual moderators. Use qualitative methods to capture emerging changes in implementation,
experiences of the intervention and unanticipated or complex causal pathways, and to generate
new theory.
Quantitative approach:
Pragmatic cluster randomized clinical trial to test the efficacy (the unit of
randomization is the volunteer and the unit of analysis is the patient/relative).
Before-after design for satisfaction of volunteers and HPC with the intervention and its
implementation to test the effectiveness.
Cost-utility study from the perspective of the funder with a time horizon of one year. A
detailed cost analysis including costs for the adaptation of volunteer standard course
to ITVPal Programme as well as the recruitment and training costs of the volunteers will
be performed.
Qualitative approach: interviews (individuals and groupal) with HPC, volunteers and with key
informants of patients/relatives to test at the beginning the need and usefulness of NT, and
also during the implementation process to test changes and experiences.