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Although Marianna Fotaki's Editorial is helpful and challenging by looking at both the professional and institutional requirements for reinstalling compassion in order to aim for good quality healthcare, the causes that hinder this development remain unexamined. In this commentary, 3 causes are discussed; the boundary between the moral and the political; Neoliberalism; and the underdevelopment of reflection on the nature of care. A plea is made for more philosophical reflection on the nature of care and its implications in healthcare education.

In the health-related and practical-theological debate, it is increasingly recognized that the core task of healthcare chaplaincy is spiritual care. There is a focus on the fundamental importance and necessity of spiritual accompaniment. However, concepts relating to this are only described in outline. Concepts that develop healthcare chaplaincy more precisely and present specific methods for the concrete "how" of spiritual care are still rare. This article outlines a basic dimension for chaplaincy and a methodology that is committed to the spiritual reality of people in secular modernity, beyond the internal religious culture.

The article defends the position that providing spiritual care first and foremost is an art in which tools and instruments are subordinate to practical knowledge, experience, and wisdom of the phenomenon.
A growing number of instruments and tools for spiritual care have been developed, tested, and validated. Some have been designed for the purpose of doing research, others have been developed for the practice of spiritual caregiving. These instruments and tools have impact both on the way we provide spiritual care, and the way we look upon spiritual care. Behind these developments are different views about what counts as scientific knowledge, as the methodologies used are based in such different paradigms as natural sciences, social constructivism, and phenomenology. The methodology used impacts how spirituality and spiritual care are viewed, as a methodology shapes our understanding of the object which is studied.
When viewing spiritual care as an art, we base this on an understanding of spiritual care as a dynamic and relational phenomenon. To support this perception, the article structures its arguments on the following elements:
1) The hermeneutic nature of spiritual caregiving 2) The role of the practice of spiritual caregiving 3) The nature of tacit and intuitive knowledge. The article bridges these arguments by providing empirical examples from spiritual care providers in Denmark.

In the Netherlands, physician-assisted dying has been legalized since 2002. Currently, an increasing number of Dutch citizens are in favour of a more relaxed interpretation of the law. Based on an ethos of self-determination and autonomy, there is a strong political lobby for the legal right to assisted dying when life is considered to be completed and no longer worth living. Building on previous empirical research, this article provides a critical ethical reflection upon this social issue. In the first part, we discuss the following question: what is the lived experience of older people who consider their lives to be completed and no longer worth living? We describe the reported loss of a sense of autonomy, dignity and independence in the lives of these older people. In the second part, from an ethics of care stance, we analyse the emerging social and political challenges behind the wish to die. Empirically grounded, the authors argue that the debate on 'completed life in old age' should primarily focus not on the question of whether or not to legitimize a self-directed death but on how to build an inclusive society where people may feel less unneeded, useless and marginalized.

In the Netherlands, physician-assisted dying has been legalized since 2002. Currently, an increasing number of Dutch citizens are in favour of a more relaxed interpretation of the law. Based on an ethos of self-determination and autonomy, there is a strong political lobby for the legal right to assisted dying when life is considered to be completed and no longer worth living. Building on previous empirical research, this article provides a critical ethical reflection upon this social issue. In the first part, we discuss the following question: what is the lived experience of older people who consider their lives to be completed and no longer worth living? We describe the reported loss of a sense of autonomy, dignity and independence in the lives of these older people. In the second part, from an ethics of care stance, we analyse the emerging social and political challenges behind the wish to die. Empirically grounded, the authors argue that the debate on 'completed life in old age' should primarily focus not on the question of whether or not to legitimize a self-directed death but on how to build an inclusive society where people may feel less unneeded, useless and marginalized.

Words matter, especially in times of crisis. This article analyses the complexities of political discourse on vulnerability by considering the case of the Dutch COVID-19 response. Our study finds that the framing of vulnerability as a predetermined and naturalised condition, linked to old age and pre-existing medical conditions, draws attention away from aspects of precarisation tied to economic position, social class, cultural background and living conditions. This rhetorical strategy can be understood as a practice of de-responsibilisation through which attention is rhetorically diverted from the way(s) in which political authorities are implicated in producing, exacerbating or failing to mitigate vulnerabilities.

This paper examines the prevalence of the ideal of "independence" in intellectual disability care in the Netherlands. It responds to a number of scholars who have interrogated this ideal through the lens of Michel Foucault's vocabulary of governmentality. Such analyses hold that the goal of "becoming independent" subjects people with intellectual disabilities to various constraints and limitations that ensure their continued oppression. As a result, these authors contend, the commitment to the ideal of "independence" – the "ethic of autonomy" – actually threatens to become an obstacle to flourishing in the group home. This paper offers an alternative analysis. It does so by drawing on a case study taken from an ethnographic study on group home life in the Netherlands. Briefly put, the disagreement stems from differing conceptualizations of moral life. Put in the vocabulary of moral anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, the authors propose to approach the group home more from a "first-person" perspective rather than chiefly from a "third-person" perspective. They then draw on Mattingly to cast the group home as a "moral laboratory" in which the ethic of autonomy is not just reproduced but also enacted, and in which the terms of (in)dependence constantly get renegotiated in practice. What emerges is not only a new perspective on the workings of the "ethic of autonomy" in the group home, but also an argument about the possible limitations of the vocabulary of governmentality for analysing care practices.

While the COVID-19 crisis has affected people all around the world, it has not affected everyone in the same way. Besides glaring international differences, disparities in personal and situational factors have resulted in strikingly dissimilar effects even on people within the same country. Special attention is required in this regard for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) who are vulnerable to marginalization and precarization during crises as concerns over safety and public health are likely to trump consideration for inclusion and care. This article explores the lived experiences during the pandemic of people with ID living in care institutions in the Netherlands. Particular attention is paid to the challenges involved in living through periods of confinement and separation in what may be called "vulnerable spaces." Drawing from interviews with individuals with a mild ID who have been restricted in seeing family and friends through the closed access of group homes to visits from outsiders, as well as interviews with their relatives and support workers, the article considers the ways in which stakeholders have responded to these spatial policies and negotiated the meaning of living space in times of crisis.

This book explores how a sense of wonder and the musicality of silence can be a rehumanizing force in education, health and welfare, countering overly anthropocentric and instrumental worldviews. Wonder--in an aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual sense--brings human beings in resonance with the world again.