{
  "abstract": "Background The clinical support workforce of healthcare assistants, porters and domestics comprise non-registered staff who deliver a significant proportion of end of life care. Through ethnography, the research revealed aspects of end of life care not usually seen or talked about such as the crafting of back stages and their use of emotional labour. These rich set of ideas helps revive ethnography – not only within an organisation, but palliative care widely and raises end of life care work undertaken by these staff.Aims Ethnography is an attempt to tell a holistic, well-studied story about a culture or subculture using a different lens (Van Maanen. Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. University of Chicago Press; 1988). This contextually based research informs our ideas about end of life care and healthcare revealing and rendering explicit their roles in the social organisation of end of life care.Methods This ethnographic study, with full ethical and organisational approval used a qualitative, naturalistic approach with participant observation and semi-structured interviews across the staff groups.Results Using an ethnographic approach affords access to backroom places and spaces not usually frequented with hidden aspects that arise in such interactions acknowledged and rendered explicit (Eriksson, Kovalainen. Qualitative methods in business research: a practical guide to social research. SAGE Publications Ltd; 2015). In order to preserve the rich, thick descriptions of observations and participants’ stories, the use of tropes, prose and poetry statements were intertwined to ‘tell tales of the field’ (Van Maanen. Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. University of Chicago Press; 1988).Conclusion The research has made contributions to the social organisation of end of life care and why this matters, which links to local issues of culture, resource and status. This cuts across activity and care provision, adding to knowledge of how care is constructed and integrated which contributes to death literacy (Sallnow, Smith, Ahmedzai, et al. Lancet. 2022 Feb 26;399(10327):837-884). Using ethnography as a means of further understanding lived, shared experiences has implications in understanding ways in which end of life care is organised within an organisation and staff roles within this.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Anne-Marie Raftery"
    }
  ],
  "title": "P-187 Enhancing end of life care through nurse-led ethnography – the roles and experiences of health care assistants, porters and domestics",
  "uid": "a89949ec-a567-5007-97f0-284b9dd32a03"
}