Ethical issues raised by the outbreak of COVID-19 have predominantly been addressed through a public health ethics lens. This article proposes that the rising COVID-19 fatalities and the World Health Organization’s failure to include palliative care as part of its guidance on how to maintain essential health services during the pandemic have exposed palliative care as an underlying global crisis. It therefore calls for a different ethical framework that includes a care ethics perspective and thereby addresses the ways in which (...) the pandemic has triggered new difficulties in ensuring the delivery of appropriate end-of-life care for the dying. The article analyses the structural weaknesses of palliative care accentuated by the pandemic and proposes solutions that could set in motion lasting changes in the way it is delivered beyond COVID-19. (shrink)

Western culture can be described as death-denying and youth-obsessed. Yet this has not always been the case. Only a few generations ago, death was very much part of life where people died at home with their families members caring for them. A shift occurred, in part, because of the unprecedented advances in medical science that the western world has seen over the past 40 years. Health care professionals now have the knowledge and the technology to prolong life in ways that (...) were previously not only unattainable, but inconceivable. Regardless, the reality that death will eventually come for each of us has not changed; merely our perception of it has. This perception is influenced by the hidden nature of death in our society. This begs the questions: if death in our culture is something to hide, to conceal, and to keep secret, then what does that say about our ability to express grief? What does this mean for those who face it as part of their chosen profession? How might we understand the nature of suffering for those who turn toward the suffering of others? This paper interpretively examines the nature of hidden death and hidden grief in our society. (shrink)