End of Life Care is a broad term describing all the decisions and activities that go into a person’s final days, months, or years. It can include managing symptoms that come with life-threatening illnesses, supporting a dying patient’s mental wellbeing, or guiding someone through the medical options that they can pursue.
End of life care can involve many parties, including doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, patients, and family members. Although most people in Western countries die in medical facilities, end of life care can also take place in many contexts, including nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, or even the home.
In historically Christian majority countries, healthcare has been strongly shaped by Christianity. This shapes how end of life care is administered. Even the advent of palliative care, which shifted focus from curing patients to increasing their comfort and dignity, was largely influenced by Christianity. This influence emphasizes particular notions, such as people “going to a better place” when they die or treating a patient’s “spiritual needs.”
To explore changes in end of life care, our study adopts a multi-pronged approach. This mixed-methods approach will involve interviews with hospice workers and death doulas, a questionnaire among people who have recently lost someone close to them, and a meta-narrative review of literature in palliative care academic journals. Our study hopes to push back against presumptions that all people at the end of life want or need some kind of spiritual care. With this in mind, we want to think more broadly about what a “good death” means, and what this looks like when working amongst the shifting demographics shaped by the rise of nonreligion.
