Paroles de médecins généralistes : comment font-ils avec les difficultés ressenties pendant l'accompagnement d'un patient en fin de vie ?

Data is missing about the difficulties of general practitioners especially regarding home-based palliative care, as most studies mainly aim on healthcare professionals in hospital and organizational factors leading to professionals suffering. Through this qualitative study, we give special attention to experiences of general practitioners in their palliative care daily practice, especially to find out distress factors and strategies of coping used. Main distresses are linked as much with emotional factors than with practical contingencies. Several strategies of coping are developed by those doctors: mainly strategies focused on emotional control as can be expressing feelings, but also strategies focused on problem solving like looking for technical support and resources of information. The prevalence of emotional distress factors revealed with those interviews doesn't match with results found in literature that underline more organizational factors. General practitioners seem to implement correct and efficient coping strategies along with their increasing experiences of those situations. We also found a lake of training in coping with stress situations and emotional factors while accompanying the terminally ill referred by those physicians. It should be interesting to reinforce training on those issues during initial and continuous medical training.