End-of-life Care and Beyond

Abstract

ABSTRACTOne of the challenges of palliative care is to honour the personal wishes of culturally diverse patients while meeting ‘universal medical relief standards’. Diverging perspectives on good care can result in intercultural negotiations, such as those analysed in this paper between Dutch care professionals and immigrant families with a Turkish and Moroccan background. Fewer tensions are apparent during the burial care phase. This paper outlines the experiences of immigrant families and their Dutch care professionals in the transition from palliative care to burial care. Their narratives highlight how undertakers offer burials that follow the funeral rituals practised in their customers’ (predominantly Muslim) home countries and therefore employ bilingual staff to fulfil the specific wishes of the families. Palliative care professionals, on the other hand, tend to follow their Dutch interpretation of ‘universal medical relief standards’. The contrast not only reveals cultural diversity, but also different logics of care; while undertakers follow the logic of the market and the logic of family life, health care professionals tend to follow the logics of professionalism and politics.