About dying and death: Thanatology's place in medical curriculum
Abstract
This study explored how healthcare providers engage in advance care planning and end-of-life care conversations. The research explored what shapes their understanding and the extent to which concepts from thanatology they intuitively bring in, explicitly bring in, and maybe fail to recognize. To achieve this, constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology guided the design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the findings, which allowed for iteration across interviews and analysis with existing theories and data in the literature. The CGT design encouraged further engagement with the literature in an ongoing iterative fashion as well as with the analysis of the data. The study engaged 20 healthcare provider participants. Most were interviewed on two separate occasions. Analysis was conducted after each interview. This two-phase semi-structured interview approach enabled ongoing, iterative exploration of the data. The findings revealed that thanatological concepts from these engaged participants came intuitively through experience. This further experience allowed us to gain some novel insights into places where thanatology concepts may support a better educational process for medical students to practicing physicians.