Bringing our dying home: How caring for someone at end of life builds social capital and develops compassionate communities.

Circles of care: should community development redefine the practice of palliative care?

“…Various initiatives are exploring how ethnic minority communities can be supported to enhance care of the dying within the community rather than in an institution 9 10. In Sydney, for example, a project of supporting carers to make the best use of their network of family, friends and neighbours has been in existence for nearly 30 years 11. In this project, carers are supported on a one to one basis by a volunteer mentor who can both provide emotional support and help enable the carer to share the care among their network.…”

“…All of us recognise that we exist and find meaning, to a greater or lesser degree, through our relationships with the world around us, which we can call our community. This community can be extended and exists within geographical locations now extended through the telephone and internet networks 11 16. Our relationships help us to identify our sense of identity and use in our worlds, but this can change as a result of having an illness.…”

“Charity Begins at Home”: Informal Caring Barriers to Formal Volunteering Among Older People

“…There is some recognition, however, that contributions in the form of informal volunteering and caring have value and are important to facilitate the functioning of family units, which in turn have productive value for the economy as a whole (Kelemen, Mangan, and Moffat, 2017;Martinez et al, 2011). For example, looking after the dying in their own homes is a key attribute of "compassionate communities" (Horsfall et al, 2012), and can provide both patient and carer with a sense of social integration and belonging (Horsfall et al, 2017). Given (i) the substantial individual and societal benefits derived from volunteering and caring activities, (ii) the opportunities presented by population aging to access growing numbers of potential volunteers, and (iii) declining rates of formal volunteering, it is important to better understand the choices older people make between different forms of unpaid labor.…”

Power, privilege and provocation: Public Health Palliative Care today

“…This need for respectful collaboration and the crucial role of informal networks was described by Debbie Horsfall, Rosemary Leonard, John Rosenberg and Kerrie Noonan in their research on caring at end of life. 5,6 In a 2016 review of public health approaches to palliative care, 7 Colleen Dempers and Merryn Gott acknowledged the blurred boundaries between the broad disciplines of palliative care and public health. They identified three overarching paradigms in PHPC: (1) health promotion approaches, (2) WHO approach, and, (3) population-based approaches, reflecting a continuum from communities to countries and on to populations.…”