Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy.
Fondazione Floriani, 20154 Milano, Italy.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Jul 30;18(15):8081. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18158081.
The possibility of coming to a "good death" is a challenging issue that crosses ethical and religious beliefs, cultural assumptions, as well as medical expertise. The provision of palliative care for relieving patients' pain is a practice that reshapes the path to the event of death and gives form to a particular context of awareness, recalling the notion proposed by Glaser and Strauss. This decision redesigns the relationships between patients, practitioners and caregivers and introduces a new pattern of collaboration between them. Our study focuses on the implications of the collaboration between practitioners and caregivers, starting from the assumption that the latter may provide support to their loved ones and to the practitioners, but need to be supported too. We provide a qualitative analysis of this collaboration based on an empirical research that took place in four different settings of provision of palliative care, reporting the contrast between the affective engagement of caregivers and the professional approach of practitioners. We claim that this ambivalent collaboration, while embedded in contingent and incommensurable experiences, brings to the fore the broader understanding of the path to a "good death," outlining its societal representation as a collective challenge.
“善终”的可能性是一个具有挑战性的问题，涉及到伦理和宗教信仰、文化假设以及医学专业知识。提供姑息治疗以缓解患者的痛苦是一种重塑死亡事件路径的实践，为特定的意识背景赋予形式，让人想起 Glaser 和 Strauss 提出的概念。这一决策重新设计了患者、从业者和护理人员之间的关系，并在他们之间引入了一种新的合作模式。我们的研究关注从业者和护理人员之间合作的影响，从后者可能为他们所爱的人和从业者提供支持，但也需要得到支持这一假设出发。我们基于在姑息治疗的四个不同提供环境中进行的实证研究，对这种合作进行了定性分析，报告了护理人员的情感投入与从业者的专业方法之间的对比。我们声称，这种矛盾的合作虽然嵌入在偶然和不可通约的经验中，但凸显了对“善终”之路的更广泛理解，将其作为一个集体挑战的社会代表性勾勒出来。
