Living with Dying: A Handbook for End-of-Life Healthcare Practitioners

By Joan Berzoff and Phyllis Silverman (editors)

Features the chapter "Fragments of Love: Explorations in the Ethnography of Suffering and Professional Caregiving" by David Browning of EDC’s Center for Applied Ethics. The chapter advises health care professionals to be faithful to the lived experience of their clients, and faithful to their own lived experience in their meetings with clients. The chapter advocates that caregiving be based on an ethnographic approach, borrowed from anthropology, in which caregivers seek a deeper understanding of their patients through careful looking, listening, and responding. Adopting an ethnographic stance requires a number of changes in end-of-life and bereavement care. Professional caregivers must: (1) validate and reclaim their vocations of caring from the dictates of a market economy and health care system driven by cost-efficiency and profit; (2) be careful not to allow diagnostic and treatment paradigms to overshadow or distort the human encounter that is at the core of their work; (3) see their personal knowledge of suffering as integral to the collaborative healing process between their clients and themselves;(4) be prepared to bear witness to suffering that may not always be transformed or transcended, but rather, endured.

Living with Dying: A Handbook for End-of-Life Healthcare Practitioners is the first textbook on palliative care for healthcare practitioners written from a social work perspective. It provides ways to ensure a respectful death for individuals, families, groups, and communities and is organized around theoretical issues in loss, grief, and bereavement and around clinical practice with individuals, families, and groups.

Contact Info: David Browning (1-800-225-4276 x2822)

Published by: Columbia University Press Order Info

Price: $96.50
ISBN: 0231127944
(928 pp) Print