Poster Abstracts
Death and dying in Northern Ireland; an autoethnographic tale of too many teams and too little integration
Author:
Áine Høgsgaard
Prof. of Healthcare Integration and Improvement, University College Dublin/National Rehabilitation Hospital Co-Director, IE
Abstract
In Northern Ireland access to good quality palliative care is an accepted and expected part of modern cancer care. The ‘Transforming Your Palliative and End of Life Care’ Programme ‘supports the design and delivery of coordinated services to enable people with palliative and end of life care needs to have choice in their place of care, greater access to services and improved outcomes at the end of their lives’. In this account, utilizing the qualitative research method of autoethnography the author describes her experience of caring for father over the last 6 months of his life, from diagnosis to death from terminal lung cancer. She explores the tensions between the different players involved in the care of her father and the family and the internal conflict that developed within her as daughter, carer, care co-ordinator and doctor.
Narration can be a powerful tool for capturing the authentic lived experiences of individuals and families and is a tool seldom utilised in integrated care.
This account, a story of death and dying in Northern Ireland, also provides an insight into the author's expectations of integrated palliative care, as a designer and implementer and now academic in integrated care and concludes with some reflections about the emerging position of palliative care services in Northern Ireland. She concludes that in her experience, Something was lost, yet something was found.
How to Cite:
Høgsgaard Á. Death and dying in Northern Ireland; an autoethnographic tale of too many teams and too little integration. International Journal of Integrated Care. 2021;21(S1):333. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ijic.ICIC20578
Published on
01 Sep 2021.
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