Care Workers’ Involvement with Those Facing Their Own Death

Abstract

The last chapter considered the experience of people who are facing death. Here, I look at the experience of social care practitioners whose work brings them into contact with them. The first section of this chapter offers examples, from across the range of social care services, of situations in which the anticipated or imminent death of the service user is a significant factor in the work to be done. The section that follows relates to the workers’ responses. What is the role of the practitioner? What is distinctive about it, and what are some of the practice issues and tensions? Links will be made with the features identified in Chapter 2 as characteristic of social care (section 2.3). The last section identifies specialist skills and knowledge that are seen by the workers involved to underpin their current work with dying people, and the training and support that is available to them. Throughout the chapter, use will be made, as appropriate, of the theoretical concepts identified in Chapter 3, and references made to the experiences and needs of dying people, as discussed in Chapter 4.