End-Of-Life-Care and Limits of Patient Agency

Tue 19 November 2019

Institute of Public Health

Erica Borgstrom

'Choice in end-of-life care: how much choice do patients have?'

Choice in end-of-life care policy is widely lauded and tightly bound. Some topics are excluded from patient decision-making, others so prescribed as to make decisions irrelevant, and yet others so prioritised they discount pertinent patient wishes. Choice is also often unhelpfully cast as individual patient decision-making, missing the relational aspects of care delivery and the priorities of the individual outside of their patient role.


Natashe Lemos Dekker

'Moral frames for lives worth living: Managing the end of life with dementia'
I pay attention to the voices of people with dementia and their family members who consider the end of life with dementia undignified and who may seek possibilities for allowing death to be hastened or welcomed. This reflects broader negative representations of the end of life with dementia that carry moral claims as to the value of life with dementia. I argue that welcoming death is not an act of indifference but can be seen as a form of care.