Attitudes to death: a time to pose difficult questions

Abstract

One of the emphases of the End of Life Care Strategy (Department of Health, 2008) was the need for intensified effort from both the public and professionals to talk openly about death and dying as a process we all go through. The Dying Matters Alliance formed in 2009 as a direct result of the recommendations of the strategy and has done a lot of excellent work in its attempt to change attitudes of society towards dying. There are good reasons why it is important to talk openly about one’s dying, including making preparation for death, or, broadly speaking, ‘putting one’s house in order’. Dying Matters, together with the National Council for Palliative Care, have been working with their 30 000 members (Levenson, 2013) to change attitudes. While we attempt to encourage more people to talk openly about dying, we must also try and understand some of the practices, deeply held values and behaviours that might militate against our efforts. We should try and understand the barriers that stop some people talking. We need real evidence through research on this so that we come up with effective strategies to help everyone in society. However, in the absence of real evidence, there are several possible permutations we might consider.