A Death of One's Own

This book investigates individual differences in understandings of dying well from the perspective of patients receiving palliative care. Dying well has traditionally been researched from the health professional's perspective, and this has produced a relatively uniform understanding. Q-methodology was used to investigate differences from the patients' perspective, and four accounts of dying well emerged. These accounts emphasised the different values placed on various aspects of the dying experience and were labelled: religious-oriented, independent-oriented, idealised, and family-oriented accounts. The nature of these different accounts implies that there is neither total idiosyncrasy nor total uniformity in patients' understandings. This raises questions about the targets of our current interventions, but also offers some potential new directions for providing palliative care services at this important time in an individual's life.