Medical practice, procedure manuals and the standardisation of hospital death

Abstract

This paper examines how death is managed in a larger regional hospital within the Norwegian health-care. The central focus of my paper concerns variations in how healthcare personnel enact death and handle the dead patient. Over several decades, modern standardised hospital death has come under critique in the western world. Such critique has resulted in changes in the standardisation of hospital deaths within Norwegian health-care. In the wake of the hospice movement and with greater focus on palliative care, doors have gradually been opened and relatives of the deceased are now more often invited to participate. I explore how the medical practice around death along with the procedure manual of post-mortem care at Trondheim University Hospital has changed. I argue that in the late-modern context, standardisation of hospital death is a multidimensional affair, embedded in a far more comprehensive framework than the depersonalized medico-legal. In the late-modern Norwegian hospital, interdisciplinary negotiation and co-operation has allowed a number of different agendas to co-exist, without any ensuing loss of the medical power holder's authority to broker death. I follow Mol's notion of praxiographic orientation of the actor-network approach while exploring this medical practice.

Music during after‐death care: a focus group study

“…Studies show that nurses treat the dead body carefully and with deep respect during after‐death care (Lawler, 1991; Hadders, 2007; Hadders, 2009b; Hadders, 2010). Hadders (2010) found that nurses treated the body in much the same manner as they treated patients in the terminal phase.…”

Atuação do enfermeiro frente ao processo morte/morrer em uma unidade de terapia intensiva: uma revisão integrativa

“…Há uma importância significativa para os enfermeiros da UTI para reconhecer e compreender as barreiras e facilitadores de prestação de cuidados de fim de vida dentro de sua unidade específica (WRIGHT; PRASUN; HILGENBERG, 2011;HADDERS, 2009 Enfatiza-se que a enfermagem presta cuidados pautados em evidências, tornando-se necessário a ampliação de debates, considerando ser esta uma dimensão importante no processo de cuidado de enfermagem. Presenciar o morrer de pacientes, gera naquele que os assiste, diversas sensações, como a perda e a impotência.…”

La biomedicalización de la muerte: una revisión

“…La complejidad de este paso reside en que, por un lado, la presencia de familiares no puede limitarse a una atestiguación del proceso sino que requiere de profesionales que den apoyo y, por otro lado, también debe tomarse en consideración cómo esta presencia interfiere en el escenario técnico de intervención que se produce actualmente en esta situación. Hadders (2007aHadders ( , 2009a y McGaheyOakland et al (2007) remarcan que uno de los elementos más reclamados para abordar esta situación es la creación de protocolos que estandaricen y guíen esta práctica, y que recojan la diversidad de elementos mencionados.…”

“…De este modo, hemos mencionado estudios que abordan la muerte a partir del análisis del discurso que la constituye (Flores-Pons & Íñiguez-Rueda, 2009;Hadders, 2009a;Li & Arber, 2006).…”