Journal article
Hope pluralism in antenatal palliative care
- Abstract:
- When parents face the distressing news during pregnancy that their baby is affected by a serious medical condition that will likely lead to the baby’s death before or soon after birth, they experience a range of complex emotions. Perhaps paradoxically, one common response is that of hope. Navigating such hope in antenatal interactions with parents can be difficult for health care professionals. That can stem from a desire to accurately communicate prognostic information and a fear of conveying ‘false hope’ to families. In this paper we examine the role that hope plays when parents and health care professionals are grappling with a confirmed antenatal diagnosis of a life-limiting condition. We assess what it means to hope in this context and consider the different types of hopes held by both parents and health care professionals as well as why hopeful thinking might be helpful and not harmful. We propose “hope pluralism” as a concept that might allow healthcare professionals to accommodate a multitude of parental and professional hopes, even where these conflict. Finally, we offer some practical suggestions for how professionals should evaluate and respond to hope in situations that might (from the outside) appear hopeless.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 268.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/jme-2024-110120
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 203132/Z/16/Z
- Publisher:
- BMJ Publishing Group
- Journal:
- Journal of Medical Ethics More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2024-10-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-09-27
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1473-4257
- ISSN:
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0306-6800
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2033608
- Local pid:
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pubs:2033608
- Deposit date:
-
2024-09-30
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Bertaud et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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