Patient dying in hospital: An honoured guest in an honoured place?

摘要

This title is adapted from an inspiring essay by Ken Warpole Commissioned by the Irish Hospice Foundation in 2005, Warpole reviewed the architecture and design of hospital spaces in which the dying find themselves. The idea of hospital being an honoured place with dying patients as honoured guests opens a new window into our daily reality of working in hospitals.In 1908 William Osier undertook a substantial study of sequential hospital death in the USA. Having studied 486 deaths at John Hopkins Hospital, Osier summarized his findings with the reassuring statement '90 suffered bodily pain or distress, 11 showed mental apprehension. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other like their birth their death was a sleep and a forgetting'.