On "dying well"

The importance of hospice and palliative care was politically reaffirmed on November 5, 2015, by the law on more comprehensive hospice and palliative care in Germany. This reflects a trend that has emerged in recent decades, focusing on the hospice movement, inpatient and outpatient hospice care, palliative care and medicine, successful end-of-life practices, and the question of “dying well.”

Nowadays, a "good death" involves complex management of dying, encompassing medicine, pastoral care, nursing, family, and friends; but above all, each individual is encouraged to be in control of their own dying. This implies that the quality of life in the last days of life – personal well-being, closeness to other people, but also the extent of fears, sadness, and depression – is increasingly becoming the focus of everyday end-of-life care practice and involves all those affected, the family and friends, caregivers and doctors, as well as volunteers.

This broadened the perspective on the dying person and included relatives, professionals, etc. in the dying process, creating a new space for attention in which clear-cut solutions and ultimate meanings of dying had to be replaced by differences in perspective and constellations of actors with regard to end-of-life care and the dying process. Sociologist Tony Walter called this new constellation of dying “neo-modern.” However, the multiple perspectives can lead to uncertainties in practice regarding the interpretation of a normative ideal of “dying well.”

The research project aims to capture the different perspectives and constellations of actors using qualitative methods—interviews, non-participatory observation, document analysis—and is novel in that the diversity of perspectives in multi-professional organizational settings with regard to end-of-life care is largely unexplored.