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Avoiding Death
The ultimate challenge in the provision of contemporary healthcare?
Kay Price
Senior Lecturer, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of South Australia, Adelaide SA
Julianne Cheek
Institute of Nursing and Health Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo and Centre for Research into Sustainable Health Care, University of South Australia
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore how the avoidance of death preoccupies the focus of most health professionals, including policy makers, in the western world, and the implications of this for the lives of people with chronic diseases.
Avoiding death has become the ultimate challenge in the provision of contemporary healthcare. An implication of this way of thinking for people with chronic diseases is that their chronic disease is then positioned as something which will produce a death which could have been avoided.
Such a death is then viewed as failure, not only biological, but also social. However, such failure is also positioned as a personal one as well: people did not self-manage their lives ‘properly'.
Keywords
death, chronic disease, sociology, normal death, avoiding death, self management
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