In search of a good death

Editor—I refer to assumptions about the good death that are implicit in Ellershaw and Ward's paper.¹ Dying is a social process guided by expectations of appropriate behaviours which delimit a range of dying trajectories, thus defining normal and abnormal dying.²

One example of a good death discourse is dominated by a secular, autonomy driven, privacy oriented approach. It is promulgated in talk shows, the popular media, legislative chambers, and in societies devoted to a “dignified death,” assistance in dying, or some euphemism for terminating human life in the name of compassion. Compassion, dignity, and freedom are also in biblical teachings, but they are different in spirit and content from the secular construal of those sentiments. The rules of discourse are now set so that any argument based on faith is inadmissible simply by virtue of its being religious.

If some hospices are finding it increasingly difficult to practise what they preached for years, what hope is there for an NHS stuck in a swamp of tick box rationality? We live in an era where prescriptive dictums reign supreme, producing an attentive work-force who can recite, verbatim, procedure and protocol.

I am seriously concerned that “real time”care, never mind “good death” is being insidiously superseded by paranoid paperwork propagators who are sucking individuality from healthcare practice. Yes, we are encouraged to think freely by those who freely think on our behalf.