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Dr Morgan draws on Dr Mannix’s discussion of ‘ordinary dying’ to explore how those “working in the deep technology of the intensive care unit (ICU)” can learn to “mov[e] away from framing our patients’ health problems as events and towards understanding them as processes”. As with ordinary dying, this is a move to understand not only the patient in a wider context of their healthcare journey, but to understand how medicine can contribute to “a good life”. As we note in our recent Marie Curie blog on ordinary dying, these are issues social scientists have a long history of exploring and which healthcare professionals will need to engage, if they are to avoid problematic normative assumptions about how their patients wish to live, be cared for, or die.
Alongside palliative care and ICU, may I mention care homes as a specialty that features the word 'care' in its name?
Care home staff, like Dr Morgan in his work, frame their residents' health problems as processes rather than events. We often work without words and numbers: written and spoken diagnostic cues may be missing because of communication difficulties or a lack of access to medical notes. Some monitoring devices or invasive tests are not appropriate for, or accepted by, the frail older person with dementia. We have then learned, like Dr Morgan, to focus not on numbers, physiology and "reversible" problems (which may in act not be so) but to look at the whole person and to balance textbook best practice alongside frailty, futility and resident's wishes, allowing an end of life with 'love, peace and companions'.
Reflections on ‘ordinary dying’ and the Queen - response to Matt Morgan and others
Dear Editor,
Dr Morgan draws on Dr Mannix’s discussion of ‘ordinary dying’ to explore how those “working in the deep technology of the intensive care unit (ICU)” can learn to “mov[e] away from framing our patients’ health problems as events and towards understanding them as processes”. As with ordinary dying, this is a move to understand not only the patient in a wider context of their healthcare journey, but to understand how medicine can contribute to “a good life”. As we note in our recent Marie Curie blog on ordinary dying, these are issues social scientists have a long history of exploring and which healthcare professionals will need to engage, if they are to avoid problematic normative assumptions about how their patients wish to live, be cared for, or die.
More on this topic can be found at: https://www.mariecurie.org.uk/blog/ordinary-dying-queen-elizabeth/357885
Competing interests: No competing interests