A critical examination of ‘family’ caregiving at the end of life in contexts of homelessness: Key concepts and future considerations

A critical examination of ‘family’ caregiving at the end of life in contexts of homelessness: Key concepts and future considerations
Palliative Care and Social Practice; by Ashley Mollison, Kelli I. Stajduhar, Marilou Gagnon, Ryan McNeil; 5/25
In a world that is becoming more inequitable, understanding and reducing health disparities is a key priority for palliative care. This essay has demonstrated that bio-legal assumptions and privileging may be yet one more inequity in palliative care to address and overcome. This essay has focused in on populations facing homelessness and housing vulnerability, but changing families and growing inequality suggests the potential broad applicability of this work for our collective future. Palliative care is one of the areas of the Western healthcare system that explicitly attends to the person with serious illness and their family and caregivers understanding deeply how the suffering and joys of one group impacts the other. If there is a place in the current health system that can truly make space for caregiving – in all the ways it happens – it is, and should be, palliative care.