Home death as a conditional ideal: ethnographic insights from an English hospital

Rogerson, Jennifer and Borgstrom, Erica 2025. Home death as a conditional ideal: ethnographic insights from an English hospital. Mortality 10.1080/13576275.2025.2522685

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Abstract

Advance care planning is a process that involves ascertaining and documenting a patient’s preference for future care, especially in the context of end-of-life care. Based on an ethnographic study of advance care planning involving fieldwork in an English teaching hospital in 2018, this paper highlights how for healthcare staff, advance care planning is about more than patient preferences. Instead, for staff, advance care planning links to notions of how to achieve a good death, which many interpreted as ensuring patients can die at home. Within this logic, home death was conceived as a strived for ideal. Yet, staff acknowledged home deaths were not always possible, dependent on the availability and capability of home-based care and symptom management. As such, staff recognised a need for ‘flexibility’ with processes that may focus on ensuring a patient dies at home. Consequently, we interpret this as seeing home death as a conditional ideal. This builds on existing literature that outlines and challenges expectations of good death, home death and discussion of place of death, crucially adding a term – conditional ideal – by which to understand the nuance that exists between discourses of end-of-life care and how it unfolds for staff, patients, and families.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Medicine
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	1357-6275
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	23 June 2025
Date of Acceptance:	9 May 2025
Last Modified:	23 Jun 2025 13:57
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179256

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