SRV crossover into palliative care

This book aims to provide the theoretical groundwork to enable the palliative care field to begin to analyse the current conceptualisation of palliative care from an entirely new perspective.

SRV's crossover into palliative care enables the palliative care system to become aware of its perpetuation of the devaluation of people who are dying and how to address this devaluation. To this point, explorations in end-of-life care by SRV proponents have focused on protecting vulnerable people's lives rather than on palliative care specifically. Some projects of the interdisciplinary research work of the New Emerging Teams Research Project (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, 2003) represent, to the author's knowledge, the first significantly funded research project with crossover between SRV and palliative care. As part of this project, Lutfiyya (2003) aims to develop “a conceptual analysis of how social devaluation and SRV fit into palliative and end-of- life care”. Unpublished work by van Bommel (2003) has involved the assessment of some palliative care services using SRV-based criteria. To the author's knowledge, his own work, together with van Bommel's around the same time in the mid- to late 1990s, represents the first SRV-based evaluations of specific palliative care services. This book hopes to further this crossover by formally bringing SRV theory to bear on the current conceptualisation of palliative care. Kellehear's (2005a, pp 30-5) introduction of a critique of normalisation theory, and some aspects of SRV, regarding end-of-life care is a further recent development.

Two future paths

Palliative care faces a choice similar to the one faced in the intellectual disability services system 30-40 years ago. Unless palliative care radically alters its social organisation and practice, it can only continue to unconsciously harm people who are dying by devaluing them.

The proof of the functionality of deinstitutionalised systems by the intellectual disability services system becomes even more persuasive when the outcomes necessary for a deinstitutionalised palliative care system are understood to be far simpler than those required in the intellectual disability sector. Unlike people with an intellectual disability, people who are dying, for the most part, are established in valued roles and have valued histories.