Overview

The U.S. hospital embodies society’s hope for itself—a technological bastion standing between us and death. What does the gold standard of rescue, as ideology and industry, mean for the dying patient in the hospital and for the status of dying in American culture? This book shows how dying is a management problem for hospitals, occupying space but few billable encounters and of little interest to medical practice or quality control. An anthropologist and bioethicist with two decades of professional nursing experience, Helen Chapple goes beyond current work on hospital care to present fine-grained accounts of the clinicians, patients, and families who navigate this uncharted, untidy, and unpredictable territory between the highly choreographed project of rescue and the clinical culmination of death. This book and its important social and policy implications make key contributions to the social science of medicine, nursing, hospital administration, and health care delivery fields.

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9781598744026

Table of Contents

Reviews

It is a thought provoking ethnography, which offers the argument that American hospitals are based on an imperative for heroic rescue and stabilization, leaving little room for dying in the space where rescue ends...The data collection effort appears to be extensive, including involvement with chaplains, physicians, nurses, therapists, and administrators, as well as observations on and offsite, including in-service activities, trainings, commemorations, retreats, and meetings on bereavement, ethics, policy, and planning...Chapple is clearly knowledgeable about death and dying in American hospitals and raises good questions and compelling points about hospital death. <br>-Frances Norwood, Anthropological Quarterly

<p> Readers familiar with the inner workings of hospital care will instantly empathise with the 'ritual' described in all its guises in the text. Chapple's skill is in deploying such a description that raises awareness of the tacit cultural agendas that influence clinicians' practice. The stark point being made by Chapple is that dying patients often undergo rescue needlessly and that even if the ritual permits their re-labelling as 'dying' (considered, by the author, as a 'successful' outcome of the ritual), there follows a disappointing lack of co-ordinated clinical care to meet their and their loved one's particular needs at that crucial time. [Q]ualitative evidence of this sort must be welcomed. Given the equal-ninth ranking of the US and Canada on quality of death, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit [1], Chapple's analysis provides compelling evidence as to why this might be the case. Whilst the academic reader will welcome the amount of wider referencing and research th

<p>&quot;The right to life is a hard right to refuse.&#160; No Place for Dying: Hospitals and the Ideology of Rescue is a text that discusses the legal place of the rights of the dying, the thought process behind these laws, and the position of modern medical facilities. The first chapters discuss situations where death is gauged between unavoidable and where rescue is successful. It then discusses the place of profit, and the drive to save lives in American culture. Finally, it analyzes culture and its own attitudes towards death. A complete and comprehensive text on the role hospitals play in death and dying, No Place for Dying is a scholarly and thoughtful work that would do well in community and college anthropology collections.&quot;&#160; - Five Stars from Midwest Book Review

Author Information

Helen Stanton Chapple, PhD, RN, CCRN, CT, is the Nurse Ethicist at Creighton University's Center for Health Policy and Ethics. Her twenty years of bedside nursing include oncology, research, hospice home care, cardiac and neuroscience critical care. A persistent interest in thanatology and the fate of hospitalized dying patients prompted her to pursue graduate degrees in bioethics and anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several articles in top anthropology and nursing journals.

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