The shaping of palliative care through the collaboration between practitioners and caregivers: Resources, ambivalences, and tensions

Achieving a “good death” is a challenging issue, which intersects ethical and religious beliefs, cultural assumptions, relational dimensions, and healthcare skills. Palliative care (PC), which can help control the pain of patients in a broad sense, may contribute to reshaping the path to death and to building a particular context of awareness. The choice to undertake a PC path rewrites the relationships between patients, operators, and caregivers, introducing the prerequisites for a new model of alliance. This chapter explores some of the main implications of the collaboration between caregivers and PC providers, starting from the assumption that the former can provide support to their loved ones and operators, but at the same time express the need to be supported as well. We propose a qualitative analysis of this collaboration, based on the results of empirical research carried out in four Italian contexts of PC provision, reporting the contrast between the affective commitment of the caregivers and the professional approach of operators. This ambivalent collaboration, although inherent in specific and localized experiences, allows for a broader understanding of the path that can lead to a “good death”, outlining its social representation as a collective challenge.