The Good Patient: Competing Discourses of the ‘Paternalistic Patient’ and the ‘Hospice Patient’

• In Event: Hospice and end-of-life decision-making

Abstract

Open-ended interviews explore patients’ perceptions of the original hospice mission’s wholistic care approach. Responses reflected that patients are unaware of all the services offered through hospice. Using relational dialectics as an interpretive lens, patients’ nonreceipt of comprehensive care and struggle between openness and closedness, autonomy and connectedness, and uncertainty and certainty discourses, are demonstrated as they attempt to create and maintain interdependence with IDTs and social support.

Authors

• Sarah Nebel, University of Iowa

• Tara Emmers-Sommer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas