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End of Life Awareness Level 1 – Concepts, Care, Challenges and Changes

Categories: End of Life
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About Course

The programme is extremely well fitted to the needs of people already engaged in some way in matters relating to death, dying, bereavement, palliative care, and end of life care – as well as those who seek to move into these fields. We envisage a rich online learning community on the degree, made up not only of practitioners, but also social activists, those working in artistic and cultural media, as well as people pursuing their own personal development on a matter of pressing human interest.

Course Content

Introduction and Terms

  • Thanatology
  • Society and Culture

Definitions of Dying
Understand how definitions of dying differ Identify different types of dying trajectories and forms of death Identify differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dying Understand the key role of hospitals at end of life in the Global North key ideas about end of life from a social science perspective These ideas provide important insight into our beliefs and behaviours in the face of dying, and help us to better understand how we define and organise contemporary dying.

Death Systems

Dying Trajectories

Categorising Dying
How do you know when someone is no longer ‘dying’ but ‘dead’? On the surface this might sound like a simple question to answer. However, there are different ways we can understand the movement from dying to dead.

Assisted Dying
There is a significant amount of concern and research into the challenges of social death for those living with advancing dementia, and concerns for loss of identity and autonomy comprise a significant percentage of requests for medical assistance in dying. At the same time, people requesting this life-ending procedure may want to live until symptoms are overwhelming, but this can put them in danger of passing the point of informed consent. In these instances, the goals is to try to ensure that social death, clinical death, and biological death happen as close together as possible.

The Zone of Indistinction – Between life and death
These categories of death also inform ongoing debates about the ethics and economics of keeping someone on life support when there is little to no meaningful chance of recovery. The medical anthropologist Sharon Kaufman terms this “the zone of indistinction” (2005), when someone is no longer ‘alive’ in the conventional sense but neither are they dead.

Good Death?
The term ‘good death’ is an interesting one. For some people it is a contradiction, in that death is always a harm. For others death is less problematic if it happens at specific times and under certain conditions, such as at the end of a long life with a minimum of suffering. What do you think would make for a ‘good’ death?