Table 3 Ability additional supporting quotes

• “[Palliative care social worker] is dealing not only with family dynamics that are very intense, and cultural issues … that come up quite a bit in hospice, [she] has to have that medical background to explain what’s going. And then, of course, knowing when to call the doctor if they have specific other questions. It takes a little bit of training and experience.” – P7

• “… it takes a skill base, and as you know, you build on your skill base with experience, and knowing the different kinds of venues to approach a family, how to asses a family, and knowing what to say, what not to say, how to say it, even your tone of voice and how you speak to them, how you enter then room. All of those things are very important when you’re dealing with families and working with families for end-of-life. So, I would agree with the skill base, I wouldn’t say specifically trained, because only experience trains you for something like that.” – P11

• “Every social worker should be able to provide palliative care and end of life services. As long as you’re comfortable with death and dying and really sick patients, you should be able to do this for sure.” – P12

• “But part of why we have different teams, different [social work] specialties is that I’m not going to know everything.” – P4

• “You can transfer a lot of your skills to a situation that’s dealing with end of life, but the palliative social worker is going to be a lot more familiar with that, whereas I’m going to be more familiar with something else, like talking to kids about their parents, and ICU. So, that palliative social worker, they could figure that out, you know what I mean? They could do that, but I just might be more readily able to do it.” – P10