The dying patient: Taboo, controversy and missing terms of reference for designers—an architectural perspective

Bellamy, Annie; Clark, Sam; Anstey, Sally

Abstract

Contemporary society has grown seemingly detached from the realities of growing old and subsequently, dying. A consequence, perhaps, of death becoming increasingly overmedicalised, nearly one in two UK nationals die institutional deaths. In this article we, two architectural scholars engaged in teaching, research and practice and a nurse and healthcare scholar with a focus on end-of-life care and peoples’ experiences, wish to draw attention to a controversy resulting from a paucity in current literature on the terms of reference of the dying ‘patient’ as we navigate the future implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. This contributes to a relative lack of touchstones for architects to refer to when designing person-centred palliative care environments. Unlike common building types, architects are extremely unlikely to have lived experience of palliative care environments as patients; and therefore, require the help of healthcare professionals to imagine and empathise with the requirements of a person dying away from home. This paper includes a review of ageing and dying literature to understand, and distil from an architectural perspective, who, design professionals, are designing for and to remember the nuanced characteristics of those we hold a duty of care toward. We ask readers to heed the importance of accurate terms of reference, especially when commissioning and/or designing environments of palliative care. Furthermore, we put forward an appeal for interdisciplinary collaboration to develop a framework for codesigning positive experiences of person-centred care and environments at the end of life.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 29, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Nov 16, 2020
• Publication Date: Feb 21, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 8, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 13, 2021
• Journal: Medical Humanities
• Print ISSN: 2504-5229
• Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 1
• Pages: e2-e9
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-011969
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7248960
• Publisher URL: https://mh.bmj.com/
• Related Public URLs: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/135195/