Placing death and dying: Making place at the end of life

Annelieke Driessen, Erica Borgstrom and Simon Cohn

Social Science & Medicine, 2021, vol. 291, issue C

Abstract: Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die. Central to this is the expectation that in most instances people would prefer to die at home, where they are more likely to feel most comfortable and less medicalised. In so doing, recording the preferred place of death and reducing the number of hospital deaths have become common measures of the overall quality of end of life care. We argue that as a consequence, what constitutes a desired or appropriate place is routinely defined in a very simple and static ‘geographical’ way, that is linked to conceptualising death as an unambiguous and discrete event that happens at a precise moment in time in a specific location.

Keywords: Place; Placing work; End-of-life care; Palliative care; Dying; Death; Home; United Kingdom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113974

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