Nobody Dies Alone in the Electronic Patient Record—A Qualitative Analysis of the Textual Practices of Documenting Dying and Death

Abstract

In this study, we analyse the electronic patient record (EPR) as a genre and investigate how a death is documented as part of the EPR, that is, what kind of textual practices can be found, and how they can be understood based on extracts from 42 EPRs from medical wards in Norwegian hospitals. Following from our analysis, we see four distinct patterns in the documentation of patient death: a) registering the bare minimum of information, b) registering a body stopped working, c) documenting dying quietly and placing it in peaceful surroundings, and d) highlighting the accompanied death. The textual practices of documenting the transition to death in the EPR make death appear manageable and sanitised, depicting death as either uneventful or good. While the EPR genre is steeped in biomedical language, other discourses relating to death can be seen as ways to accommodate the ideal of a dignified death.