“We Just Want to Feel at Peace”: A Qualitative Exploration of Comfort Care Needs in Geriatric Palliative Patients

Aim： An in-depth exploration of the comfort care needs, experiences, and influencing factors of Chinese elderly patients during hospice care with a view to optimizing clinical practice. Design： A qualitative descriptive study Methods： Audio-recorded, face-to-face, semi-structured, individual interviews were conducted from May 2025 to June 2025 with nurses, elderly patients, and family members in a tertiary care hospital and four health care facilities in China. Coding was conducted using NVivo 12 software and themes were distilled based on Colaizzi's seven-step phenomenological analysis. Result： Four themes and 14 sub-themes were identified. The main themes are somatic comfort, psychological and emotional comfort, environmental comfort and sociocultural and spiritual comfort. Conclusion： This study reveals multiple dimensions of comfort needs and their influencing factors, including physical, psychological, emotional, sociocultural and spiritual, in geriatric hospice care, to provide a basis for healthcare teams to more accurately identify unmet needs and develop individualized care plans. Impact： This study provides insight into patients' and families' true perceptions of comfort, providing a richer, more contextualized understanding of comfort care in geriatric hospice, which will help healthcare teams more accurately identify unmet needs and develop more personalized and humanized care plans, thereby improving the quality of geriatric hospice care. Patient or Public Contribution： There was no patient or public contribution.