Uncertain trajectories in old age and implications for families and for palliative and end of life care policy and practice
Abstract The provision of high quality end of life care for all is high on national (and international) agendas, but areas of unmet needs identified includes elderly people. This article draws on an autoethnographic account of the dying and death of my father to identify and interrogate disjunctions between end of life care policy and commonplace experiences of elderly people who die in a hospital setting. There are significant disjunctions between the "blunt" tools of end of life care policy and the everyday experiences of the dying and death of an elderly patient and an urgent need to improve end of life care for our oldest generations.
Death studies