Care as a Form of Life: Living with a Palliative Patient in One's Family in Latvia

• In Event: The Contours of Health Care in the Baltic States, Part 1

Abstract

More than ten years ago, a qualitative study was carried out on the situation of family members caring for the terminally ill in Latvia (Kalnins, I. 2006). Conducting interviews with family caregivers, their needs and desires in caregiving roles were identified, first and foremost, a need for education in practical caregiving and a need for continuing skilled guidance by medical personnel. On the basis of these findings, two practical measures were proposed: firstly, that more attention be paid to families’ support needs in the course of health professionals’ education, and, secondly, that policies be developed that would support the delivery of palliative care services to patients and families in their homes.
This paper intends to follow up the situation ten years later drawing on data generated by the following methods: discourse analysis of health professionals’ articles and interviews about palliative care in Latvian mass media, content analysis of relevant thematic strings in two family health related internet fora, and the author’s auto-ethnographic notes in her role as a caregiver for a terminally ill family member.
A recent volume has advanced a form of life as a key anthropological concept to theorize about life and death in contemporary world. A form of life points to “the way in which the social and the natural mutually absorb each other” and “rests on nothing more but nothing less than that we agree or find ourselves agreeing to a life together” (Das & Han, 2015: 3). This paper proposes to explore living with and caring for the terminally ill as a paradigmatic expression of a form of life.

Author

• Agita Luse, Riga Stradins University