Defining a Good Death (Successful Dying): Literature Review

[Akita Suggagaki]

Defining a Good Death (Successful Dying): Literature Review and a Call for Research and Public Dialogue

There is little agreement about what constitutes good death or successful dying. The authors conducted a literature search for published, English-language, peer-reviewed reports of qualitative and quantitative studies that provided a definition of a good ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

We identified 11 core themes of good death:
preferences for a specific dying process,
pain-free status,
religiosity/spiritualty,
emotional well-being,
life completion,
treatment preferences,
dignity,
family,
quality of life,
relationship with HCP, and other.

The top three themes across all stakeholder groups were preferences for dying process (94% of reports), pain-free status (81%), and emotional well-being (64%). However, some discrepancies among the respondent groups were noted in the core themes: Family perspectives included life completion (80%), quality of life (70%), dignity (70%), and presence of family (70%) more frequently than did patient perspectives regarding those items (35%–55% each). In contrast, religiosity/spirituality was reported somewhat more often in patient perspectives (65%) than in family perspectives (50%).