Residential Aged Care Facilities: Places for Living and Dying

Deborah Parker

doi:10.5130/csr.v17i1.1972

Abstract

This article explores residential aged care facilities (RACFs) as places of dying and death, and the role these spaces and places have in the construction of self identity for dying residents. It argues that RACFs, rather than being static places where events such as dying and death occur, are places that shape these experiences. They are social institutions where the construction of self identity for dying residents arises out of the individual experience within the setting, most specifically the experience of social interaction. Drawing on ethnographic work in two Australian facilities the article explores how macro level influences such as economic, social and political discourses intersect with micro level experiences of dying for those approaching death as well as family members and health professionals who support the dying.

Highlights

In modern Western societies such as Australia there is an emerging pattern of population ageing
Sudnow’s classic ethnography of death and dying in two American hospitals, conducted in the 1960s, illustrated how work patterns of nursing staff hid the reality of patient’s dying.[7]. He cites examples of patients admitted to the emergency department at night who were expected to die but were not assigned a bed. They were placed in the supply room until morning
In Gubrium’s study of a nursing home in the United States during the 1970s, residents were assigned space according to their physical deterioration or the perceived closeness to death of the resident

Summary

—INTRODUCTION

In modern Western societies such as Australia there is an emerging pattern of population ageing. Sudnow’s classic ethnography of death and dying in two American hospitals, conducted in the 1960s, illustrated how work patterns of nursing staff hid the reality of patient’s dying.[7] He cites examples of patients admitted to the emergency department at night who were expected to die but were not assigned a bed Rather, they were placed in the supply room until morning. Sequestration of the dying has been reported by Gubrium, Hockey and Froggatt.[12] In Gubrium’s study of a nursing home in the United States during the 1970s, residents were assigned space according to their physical deterioration or the perceived closeness to death of the resident. I aim to identify how the use of space within residential aged care impacts on residents’ self‐identity, and on the nature of death scenes within RACFs

—METHODOLOGY

Facility one

Facility two

—CONCLUSION