Deadlines: doing times in (Dutch) hospice

Abstract

For a person to enter a Dutch hospice as resident, a clearly articulated deadline is needed: a life expectancy of three months or less. This paper argues that this institutional timeframe of a singular, clocktimed period of more or less linearly approaching death (the end of time), affords life to unfold in hospice as a relatively clockless multitude of temporal orderings enacted by staff and residents (the time of the end). Based on a period of ethnographic fieldwork in hospices and focusgroup interviews with hospice staff, I analyse how temporal orderings manifest and intersect in different ways. The quality of these intersections presence end-of-life normativities in ways that may be instructive when designing and reflecting on end-of-life care.

Unsettling descriptions: attending to the potential of things that threaten to undermine care

“…There is a small number of STS studies focused on end of life and palliative care, which describe the doing of care in locations of practice. Pasveer (2019) analyses how time is done in multiple ways in Dutch hospices, and Pols, Pasveer and Willems (2017: 89) show how dignity is done through professional carer’s ‘relational engagement in concrete care situations’. This work articulates care as located practices of relational engagement, rather than, for example, implementation of a general principle of dignity or following clock time.…”

“…She argues that what we describe and how we describe things has to do with ‘politics and normativity in STS’ (2011: 708). Moser’s work, and that of Pasveer (2019) and Pols, Pasveer and Willems (2017), articulates end of life care in locations of practice, and restages care as being done in relational terms. This work has provided rich and detailed ethnographic descriptions of care-in-practice (Mol et al, 2010), but it has emerged largely in parallel with the FTS on critical care we introduced earlier (Martin et al, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).…”