Join our upcoming #PallANZ Tweetchat on Wednesday 27 July 2016

Moderated by @JasonMills77

Imagine if communities really cared about their members’ health and social well-being. And imagine if that care extended to the dying, death, and loss, experienced by everyone in those communities. Imagine if the idea of ‘death’ went beyond physical death and included the deaths of identity and belonging… Such frameworks do partly exist in the World Health Organization’s ‘Healthy Cities’ programs, but end-of-life care issues are often neglected.

Kellehear, A. (2005). Compassionate Cities: Public health and end-of-life care. Routledge: London.

Over a decade has passed since Australian Sociologist Allan Kellehear implored us to imagine this vision for compassionate communities’ care for those among us living with dying.

Why the emphasis on social contexts of death and dying?
In many ways, the communal experience of death and dying has become medicalised through professionalization of the (more social) hospice movement, into…