From Caring To Sharing: Study On Hospice Care Of Patients With End-stage Disease

Based on the research unit of palliative care sickroom in LF hospital, this research aimed to study how families took care of the terminally ill patients during their final stages of life from the points of viewers. For terminal cancer patients, the final stages of life mean an irreversible period that their bodily functions become declined gradually.The author found that the terminally ill patients experienced several changes during the final stages of life from service in the ward. Firstly, the symptoms completely break out and become out of control. During this period, the patients’ daily life will be controlled and disturbed, what’s worse, patients rely on medicine heavily. On the other hand, the terminally ill patient in initial stage can’t change their social role easily and still miss the normal social life out of sickroom. However, the patients can’t carry on these social work because of the gradually weak body condition. Then the patients realize that the world can keep running with them. The sadness appear. On the final stages of life, the patients become adapted to their weak body and they try to take their body condition into account. Everything start to change. Thirdly, on the attitude of death, the patients try to accept the truth of death and gradually give up the world. It can be found that the patients’ mind and awareness become more and more weak along with the decline of their body condition. Body is the fundamental base of everything.Family members and professional caretakers are used to communicate with terminal cancer patients in common way, they often act the" problem solver "for caring the ill to remedy the patients’ afunction causing by the disease. While this care model are only appropriate to those patients in stages when their symptoms are under control. We also found that caring for the ill from family members appeared the following features:they always avoid the topics of death when they communicate with patients, and they cannot put down the past grievances and so on. Caretakers are used to communicate with terminal cancer patients in common way, then the patients started to live in the way of body-existence gradually, while the caretakers’ attitudes and treatment to patients have not changed, as a result, the gap between caretakers and patients appeared.Because of the appearance of this gap, the social service existed. This kind of gap primarily resulted from caretakers’incomprehension of the changes from socialization period to silent period during final stages of life and dis-understanding of the pain suffered by patients, while social workers attempt to build connections between caretakers and patients based on new understanding of illness suffering and try to help construct a new hospice care system from body caring to mental companion.