Avoiding death: The ultimate challenge in the provision of contemporary healthcare?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore how the avoidance of death preoccupies the focus of most health professionals, including policy makers, in the western world, and the implications of this for the lives of people with chronic diseases. Avoiding death has become the ultimate challenge in the provision of contemporary healthcare. An implication of this way of thinking for people with chronic diseases is that their chronic disease is then positioned as something which will produce a death which could have been avoided. Such a death is then viewed as failure, not only biological, but also social. However, such failure is also positioned as a personal one as well: people did not self-manage their lives ‘properly’.

Key Words:

• Death
• chronic disease
• sociology
• normal death
• avoiding death
• self management