Habits of the Heart in End of Life Care
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Nate Hinerman in
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Clinical caregivers, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and chaplains, cultivate habits particular to their respective disciplines. In our medical communities, such habits naturally provide guides for caregiving and assessment. Although habits can start off thoughtful, well-intentioned, and reflective, they quickly can become routinized during implementation. Given our respective trainings, our particular care setting’s regulatory requirements, and the larger ‘culture of care’ each care setting manifests, the following challenge arises: how can caregivers keep their (inter-)actions with clients from becoming overly rigid and routine? Given newly evolving care paradigms, and in the context of current medical models, how might caregivers attend to and serve each client’s life narrative, cultural identity, goals for care, affections, and/or religious understandings sensitively, especially given overburdened care delivery environments? Caregivers who conduct their practice demonstrating unreflective care habits may be prone to overlook the uniqueness of each clinical encounter. This chapter considers the relationship between habit-taking and caregiving at life’s end in light of increasingly common ‘producers vs. consumers’ health care models.