Patients and their www.selleckchem.com/products/Bosutinib.html family members Due to the sensitive nature of research in the palliative care setting no data will be collected directly from patients. Outcomes for patients and their family members will be measured via two methods (refer to Table ​Table1).1). Firstly, rates of referrals made to specialist health services for depression or suspected depression will be collected at pre-training, post-training, and three-month follow-up points from both the intervention and control

facilities. This will allow any increase in patient referrals, compared to the control group, as an effect of staff training to be gauged. Secondly, 30 family members of patients receiving palliative Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical care from the service before and after Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the training is implemented will be interviewed to determine any perceived changes in staff practices as a result of the training, and the associated outcomes on quality of life for those in their care. A semi-structured approach will be used for these interviews to target areas of potential change whilst also allowing

for family members to discuss issues around the provision of depression-related care for their relatives and themselves. Data analysis Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data, and comparison of intervention Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and control group data, will be used to provide insight into changes in the variables targeted by the interventions, the process of change produced by the targeted intervention, as well as any resulting changes in patient referrals for depression. The effectiveness of the depression training program will be evaluated using repeated measures Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical multivariate analysis of variance with study condition (intervention or control) as the independent variable and the palliative care staff outcome measures as dependant variables.

This type of analysis will facilitate the assessment of changes in staff knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy and perceived barriers to care for depressed patients and their family members. All qualitative interviews with staff and family members will be recorded and transcribed. The research team will analyse the interviews to identify Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and interpret the key themes arising. These themes will be independently identified by members of the research team and cross-checked for inter-rater Dacomitinib reliability. Consent and thorough Ethics All participating palliative care staff and patient family members will be provided with a plain language statement and will provide written informed consent to participate in training and/or interviews. Various strategies will be used to maximise the response rate of participating staff members, and participating family members will be offered gift vouchers to compensate for their time. The project has been approved by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (DU-HREC 2009-194), Eastern Health Research and Ethics Committee (E87/0910) and South West Healthcare Multidisciplinary Ethics Committee (1/2010).