The Relationship between Practitioners and Caregivers during a Treatment of Palliative Care: A Grounded Theory of a Challenging Collaborative Process

Paolo Rossi, Matteo Crippa and Gianlorenzo Scaccabarozzi
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Paolo Rossi: Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy
Matteo Crippa: Fondazione Floriani, 20154 Milano, Italy
Gianlorenzo Scaccabarozzi: Dipartimento Fragilità Rete Locale Cure Palliative, ASST di Lecco, 23900 Lecco, Italy

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 15, 1-15

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: palliative care; good death; dying process; caregiver; grounded theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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