Gestión de la autonomía en el cuidado al final de la vida

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to analyse how the ideal of respect for the autonomy of the sick person is incorporated into end-of-life care framed within the hospice philosophy. As a central argument, I argue that, when one moves from autonomy as an idea-value to the management of autonomy at the level of concrete reality, various tensions can be glimpsed between the actors involved. The results presented are part of an extensive ethnographic work within a hospice institution in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which I analyse in depth the end-of-life care practices of the caregiver team. As a result, I present the four fundamental axes from which I consider the autonomy of the sick person is managed: the place of their values in decision-making, the embodied character of the self, the constitutive aspects of their social identity and the sense of usefulness.