Looming Threats to the Intimate Bond in Hospice Care? Economic and Organizational Pressures in the Case Study of a Hospice

2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elijah G. Ward ◽  
Audrey K. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Hospice Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Case Study ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Client Care ◽  
Client Relationship ◽  
Midwestern City

Hospice organizations are assailed by stiff competition, ever-rising costs, limited funding, and policy changes. Do such pressures stifle the high quality of care these organizations strive to provide? As a case-in-point, we draw from the mid-1990s accounts of caregivers at a nonprofit hospice in a Midwestern city in the United States. We maintain that economic pressures drive organizational restructuring, which then weakens working conditions and, thereby, weakens the staff-client relationship. We discuss effects upon worker behaviors, the worker-client relationship, and client care. This ethnographic case study signals the need to closely examine the threats that current economic and organizational pressures in the United States may pose to the quality of hospice care.

High–Tech, Aggressive Palliative Care: In the Service of Quality of Life

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Dush
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Palliative Care ◽  
Hospice Care ◽  
High Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Hospice Movement

The hospice movement grew in part as a reaction to the perception that modern medical care had become too technological at the expense of being impersonal and insensitive to human psychological and spiritual concerns. In the United States, the institutionalization of hospice care under Medicare and other reimbursement systems has further established hospice as an alternative to high-technology, high-cost care. The present paper examines the question: What if hospice care becomes itself high-technology, aggressive, costly health care in order to remain true to its goal of maximizing quality of life? Implications for the goals and philosophical underpinnings of palliative care are discussed.

scholarly journals “Maybe You Have to be Friends to be Nakama”: School Friends and Cultural Logics in the United States and Japan

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 42-62
Author(s):  
Amy Damrow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
School Climate ◽  
Peer Relations ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Ethnographic Case Study

I examine the concept of school friends by drawing on the ideas and experiences of one Japanese boy as he lived and attended school in both the United States and Japan. This ethnographic case study facilitates a comparative analysis of peer relations in schools through centering an 11-year-old’s perspective as he participated in and navigated ecological systems in both countries. Data include formal interviews with the youth, his parents, and his teachers, observations in schools in the United States and Japan, eco-maps, community maps, and sociometric questioning over a fifteen-month period. The study identified the strategies used to navigate social spaces, the different logics of school friends in the sociocultural spaces examined, and the subtle ways that particular types of communities are built in classrooms. Implications for teachers, teacher educators, administrators and others interested in building social, linguistic, and cognitive skills and a healthy school climate are discussed.

Assessment of Community Perceptions of Quality of Life to Inform the Grant-Making of a Conversion Foundation: A Case Study

1998 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-372
Author(s):  
Eileen Marie Filozof ◽  
Judith Ann McDivitt ◽  
Renuka Kumari Garg ◽  
Bettina Marie Beech ◽  
Robert Michael Goodman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Perceptions ◽  
Service Community

The mission of the rapidly increasing number of conversion foundations in the United States is to enhance quality of life of their service community, usually via grant-making. Community assessments that are guided by known best practices appear to be ideal mechanisms for informing funding decisions. This case study illustrates how we attempted this with one conversion foundation. One component of the assessment—investigation of community perceptions—was deemed most important by foundation directors. This component and the implications of the overall process for other nonprofit organizations, community practitioners, and researchers are discussed.

scholarly journals Resisting the hospice narrative in pursuit of quality of life

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian A. Tullis ◽  
Lori A. Roscoe ◽  
Patrick J. Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
End Of Life ◽  
Hospice Care ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Family Members ◽  
The United States ◽  
Curative Treatment ◽  
Model Of Care

The overall hospice philosophy is to provide care that enhances a dying person’s quality of life. Most individual’s quality of life is improved when they embrace hospice eligibility and reimbursement requirements, such as stopping burdensome and ineffective curative treatment, addressing pain and other symptoms, and seeking avenues for closure. However, this institutionalized prescription for enhancing quality of life at the end of life does not work for all patients. This article considers what happens when patients’ personal definitions of quality of life at the end of life resist the prevailing narrative of appropriate hospice care. Using a series of examples from more than 600 hours of participant observation, our findings reveal narratives of resistance that fall into three themes: i) patients and/or family members who deny the imminence of death despite an admission to hospice; ii) patients who request treatments usually defined as curative; and iii) patients who resist the organizational constraints imposed by the institutionalization of the hospice model of care. Analysis of these themes illustrates the subjective nature of quality of life at the end of life and the pressures of standardization that may accompany the growth and maturity of the hospice industry in the United States.

Visual Humor through Internet Memes (II) From harmless humour to the discriminatory potential of (anti)memes. Case Study: “The Transgender Bathroom Debate”

Transilvania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 94-100
Author(s):  
Minodora Sălcudean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The Social

After pointing out - in the first part of this study - the persuasive quality of memes, once they are created, re-mixed and shared publicly, we attempt to further analyze and discuss the social and ethical implications of this type of humour, meant for mainstream entertainment and specific to the digital era, while insisting on the relevance of its reception; when the derision hides, in fact, hostility, the use of humour can affect the image of vulnerable groups and can contribute to the exclusion of their members. The attached case study presents and analyses anti-trans memes created and shared during a notorious legislative episode in the United States, referring to the use of gender-inclusive public restrooms. This episode has provoked controversies in the American public space and has served as a new reason for discriminatory manifestations online, using internet memes.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

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