Background: People with cancer usually like to spend as much time as possible at home rather than in the hospital. Nurses have a pivotal role when patients are discharged to a unit in hospital or from hospital to the community health-care system.
Aim: To explore how frontline surgical nurses assess patients with gastrointestinal cancer receiving palliative care and the implications of their assessment and competency for the patients' discharge destinations.
Methods: A descriptive exploratory approach was used involving focus group interviews with a purposive sample of ten nurses from an inpatient gastroenterology surgical ward at a university hospital in Norway. Transcriptions of the interviews were analysed using Kvale and Brinkman's thematic approach.
Results: Two overall themes emerged that had implications for the nurses' recommendations for optimal patient follow-up care after discharge: 'the complexity of and fluctuations in the patients' health status' and 'considering the competency of the nurses at the discharge destinations'.
Conclusions: This study illustrates surgical nurses' perspectives on the discharge destinations of cancer patients receiving palliative care. The findings have implications for initiatives aimed at providing more home-based palliative care.