What is a Good Death? Health Care Professionals’ Narrations on End-of-Life Care

The present study explores how health professionals evaluate care at the end of life and what they consider to be a good death. We conducted four focus groups with 37 health professionals and used a grounded theory-based approach to analyze the transcripts of the discussions. A lack of organization, training, formalized procedures, and communication with dying persons and their families emerged. Difficulty in defining a good death derived from the ethical dilemmas that involved places to die, palliative care, and end-of-life decision making.